


how far are you

by whelvenwings



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Bisexual Dean Winchester, Castiel/Dean Winchester First Kiss, Cervitaur Dean Winchester, Coming Out, Creature Dean Winchester, Demisexual Castiel (Supernatural), M/M, Mutual Pining, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Mythology References, POV Castiel (Supernatural), Pining, Protective Dean Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:13:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 43,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23398285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whelvenwings/pseuds/whelvenwings
Summary: Castiel, freshly fired from his job, is moving to a perfectly ordinary house in a perfectly ordinary forest where he just happens to meet a perfectly ordinary guy called Dean. Sure, the house seems to be a little filled with monsters. Yes, the forest shrieks and whines at night. And without doubt, Dean saving Castiel's life is a strange kind of first date. But it's all perfectly ordinary - right?
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 158
Kudos: 437
Collections: Dean/Cas Reverse Bang 2020, The Destiel Fan Survey Favs Collection





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written as part of the DeanCas Reverse Bang 2020! My artist was psynatural and you can find her art [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23329366/). Thank you so much to the mods for running an awesome challenge!
> 
> Hope everyone out there is as okay as it's possible to be right now. <3

_Ass._

Castiel taped over another box with a kind of ferocious inefficiency. He was bad at taping boxes. He was bad at packing up. He was bad at keeping his mouth shut and he was bad at keeping his job as a lawyer and those two things were definitely related. He was bad at house-hunting with no money. He was bad at putting on a brave face when it was just him, alone, with no one watching.

_Ass. Ass. Ass._

The mantra in his head was almost helping.

For a second, he lowered his roll of tape, and breathed out. He pressed his lips together, hard, and let his eyes sweep the mess that was his living room. Books lay scattered across the floor, dry law textbooks on top of dusty old fantasy novels he’d been meaning to get rid of but had never quite got around to donating. Clothes were in a heap by the door, waiting to be shoved into his suitcase. A ladle was inexplicably hanging over the arm of the sofa, looking silver and sorrowful upside-down. A cup of coffee was on the stained end-table, and when he saw it, Castiel blinked.

He was bad at remembering to drink coffee when he made it.

Somehow, it was the puddle of cold coffee sitting meek and milky in its chipped _Trust Me, I’m a Lawyer_ mug that pitched Castiel over the edge. His expression didn’t change, but with sudden fury, he launched the roll of tape hard at the nearest wall.

It bounced off and rolled away undramatically. Castiel stared after it.

Embarrassing. Embarrassing to be alone and so angry. Embarrassing to have lost his job. Embarrassing to be himself, right now, to be the person having to tuck his tail between his legs and run away from the city that had been his home for almost a decade. He needed to go and fetch the tape, but somehow doing so felt like losing.

His phone hummed in his pocket.

Castiel scrambled for it. He allowed himself a whole shining golden moment to believe that maybe, just maybe, it was Bartholomew calling to tell him the whole thing was just a big company-wide prank, and of course he wasn’t fired from Angelus & Sons, and he could have his company car back and his office and a new secretary, and Bartholomew himself was going to take him out to the Cheesecake Factory just to thank him for being such a good sport, and –

_Best Human Ever_ read his phone screen, when he looked at it. Castiel let out a breath, and closed his eyes for a second before answering the call.

“Gabriel,” he said.

“You could sound happier about it,” said his brother.

“Sorry.”

“What’s up?”

Bleakly, Castiel looked around his apartment. He could see himself reflected in the upside-down ladle, head comically large on a little tiny body.

“Not much,” he said.

“Uh- _huh._ Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Anything new at the job you want to tell me about, any, uh, news, or -”

Castiel let out a long breath.

“Who told you?”

“I never reveal my sources.”

“Was it Hester?”

“Yeah,” Gabriel said at once. “I mean, seriously, she cannot keep a lid on it.”

“It’s a problem,” Castiel said.

“Is there a self-help book called How to Keep a Company Secret? She literally told me what you had for lunch on the day it happened. Seriously, I hope you got the chance to tell the people at your firm not to trust her with anything important, before they – you know…”

“Fired me,” Castiel said.

“Yeah.” There was a moment of dead air. “Hey, look, if you want me to put in a good word for you here with Balthazar… he’s always had a soft spot for you. And you’ve been saying for years now that you should make the move over to us… Celeste and Celeste is a great firm.”

“I’m never going to work as a lawyer again,” Castiel said, his voice flat. “C and C would never hire me. No one would. Not after what happened on Monday.”

“Castiel, listen. We’ve got a huge new job, up in Maine. Logging company wants permission to start work in a forest, they’ve got to involve the Forest Service, it’s a mess. Whole load of paperwork just came through. It’s the perfect time to apply, they’re desperate, the interns are having to take the brunt of it and none of them know the law like you do…”

“Gabriel, my legal specialty isn’t… forests. Besides. Like I said.” Castiel swallowed. “There’s no way I’m getting hired.”

“But Balthazar…”

“... Is a businessman,” Castiel finished for him. “He runs a law firm, not a charity. None of his partners would trust me. They’d use me against him. He might lose his shot at having his name on the door. It wouldn’t be worth it to him to hire me. And I’m not going to call him up and ask him, and make him tell me that.”

“But you -”

“I’m not going to do it,” Castiel said wearily, sinking down onto his sofa. The ladle, dislodged, clattered to the floor. “Drop it, Gabriel.”

“I was just going to say,” Gabriel said, “that you love being a lawyer.”

Castiel closed his eyes.

_Yes,_ he wanted to say. _Yes. I loved being a lawyer. I really did. I loved the strategies. I loved the tactics. I loved the battles that became wars with our rival firms. I loved helping clients who needed it. I loved giving a voice to a cause and speaking out on behalf of people who couldn’t, I loved it._

He swallowed.

“That was the problem,” he said. “I shouldn’t have loved it. I should have just done my job. If it had only been a job and not my whole - maybe this wouldn’t have -”

He broke off. He couldn’t say it.

“Anyway,” Gabriel said bracingly. “There are plenty more job fish in the sea, right?”

“Yes,” Castiel managed.

“How’s Sarah taking it?”

“Oh.” Castiel blinked. “Sarah. She’s…” Castiel looked around his empty living room. “Well, she’s here with me. She’s upset.”

“Say hi from me, would you?”

“Right. Um.” Castiel lifted the phone away from his ear. “Gabriel says hi,” he told thin air. After a moment, he said into his phone, “She says hi back.”

“One day you’re gonna actually let me meet her. It’s like she might as well not even exist.”

Castiel swallowed, and managed a low,

“Mm.”

“You guys still have her income, right? So you can keep the apartment?”

“Um. Well. Actually, she…” Castiel bit his lip. Maybe this was the perfect time to end a charade that had gone on far too long. “We’re cutting ties.”

Gabriel went silent. Castiel stared at the wall opposite his sofa, watching the second hand on the clock tick desultorily onward.

“You two are breaking up? And she’s right there with you?”

“... Yes,” Castiel said. “To get her things.” His eyes were falling out of focus on the clock, but he didn’t bother to zone back in.

“I’m sorry,” Gabriel said.

“It’s alright.” The loss of a fake girlfriend was the last of his problems, but he tried to make himself sound sincerely sad.

“But you’ve got savings, though,” Gabriel said. “So you’re good for a while, long enough to find work.”

Castiel was quiet. He thought about the figure in his bank account, and how far it had shrunk in the last two weeks.

“Oh,” said Gabriel after a few seconds. “So… you can’t keep the apartment?”

“No.”

“What are you going to do? You know, I have… well, I mean, you know my place is being renovated so I’m in this crappy three-room place for the next couple weeks so it’s just an airbed and the only space I have for it is the kitchen floor, but you know you can always crash with me. If you don’t mind me kicking you in the head on the way to get my coffee every morning.”

“Thanks,” Castiel said. “But I already have somewhere.”

“You’re renting again?”

“No, I actually… I bought it.”

“You _bought_ a place?”

Castiel didn’t say anything. He had no idea how to justify the rush of adrenaline-fuelled certainty that had struck him at three o’clock on Tuesday morning, when he’d been browsing for places and had come upon a listing for an absurdly cheap house in the middle of nowhere. Among all the overpriced or undersized offerings on every website he’d checked, that one house alone had seemed palatable.

And yes, maybe his fixation on the house had been mostly due to staring for eight hours beforehand at pictures of one-room apartments that clearly had mould and probably had rats. But when he’d called up to enquire about the house, the person he’d spoken to had been so helpful, and one thing had led to another, and then somehow he’d just… bought it. With a sizable chunk of his savings.

“Where is it?” Gabriel asked, after a few seconds. “Still in Tribeca?”

“No.”

“Oh. But still in Manhattan?”

“... No,” Castiel said.

“Jesus. Okay. Where is it then?”

“Maine.”

_“What?”_

“In one of the forests up there.”

“You’re joking with me.”

“No,” Castiel said simply. “I’m not.”

“But... but...”

Castiel waited for Gabriel to gather his thoughts, but he seemed to be lost for words.

“If I get work,” Castiel said eventually, “it’ll be in a sandwich shop. Or a grocery store. It won’t be Manhattan money. It was going to be a big change anyway. And I thought maybe out there, I could find some work to keep me going. Enough to get by. And rethink… everything… for a while.”

“Some work to keep you going?”

“You know…” Castiel swallowed. “Forest… things.”

“Wow. _Wow._ Okay, look, maybe you think you’re going to be able to tempt Sarah into staying with you by painting images of splitting logs topless in the middle of a forest -”

“This isn’t about anything like that.”

“You can still get out of it, though, right?”

“I don’t want to,” said Castiel.

“You can’t seriously think it’s going to be a good plan. This is a drunk at four in the morning plan.”

“Three in the morning,” Castiel said. “And sober.”

“I know you. You couldn’t make it two days in a forest.”

“You don’t know what I can do,” Castiel said, indignation starting to edge his tone. “I used to go camping all the time.”

“That was years ago. Castiel, you take a bath every day. You know what pomade is. You own Versace underwear.”

Castiel could feel the gentle press of soft material against his skin, murmuring an elegant agreement. He frowned.

“Well,” he said, with haughtiness to hide his doubt, “maybe I want something different now.”

“What, to become a lumberjack? You’re a _lawyer._ Who are you going to debate out there, the bears? The squirrels?”

“Gabriel, it’s already done.”

There was a beat of quiet.

“You’ve put pen to paper? Already?”

“The realtors have an office in the city. I went, I signed.” Castiel closed his eyes. “It’s done.”

Another pause, and then Gabriel said,

“You never were one to do the thing that makes sense.” All that stopped Castiel from snapping back was the barely-there note of pride in his voice.

“What would you have done?” Castiel asked.

“Not got fired in the first place,” Gabriel said.

“Helpful.”

“Do you need a ride down to your new house, then? I’m free this weekend.”

“I’ve got a ride,” Castiel said. “But thank you.”

“Sarah?”

“Um,” Castiel shifted uncomfortably, “no. Ishim, from work. He owed me a favour before I left. So he’s lending me his car and driver for the day tomorrow.”

“All your things are going to fit into that Porsche convertible of his?”

“He has a new Rolls Royce.”

“Not the Cullinan?”

“The Cullinan,” Castiel said. His eyes started wandering over the rest of his things, his hands itching to get back to packing, get it all finished.

“Damn. How does a junior partner afford that? Were the Angelus bonuses off the charts last year, or something? I’ve been looking at a Maserati but I think it’s about a quarter of the price of the Cullinan. Not everyone will know that, obviously, but for those who _do_ know… they’ll be comparing… you know, maybe if I looked at a few of my options, I could get the Cullinan. Maybe even give it a paint job. Something flashy. Red, maybe.”

Castiel thought about the pictures he’d seen of his house in the forest. Even a kind angle hadn’t managed to conceal the way the paint had been cracking over the wood of the outside walls.

“Sounds good,” he said.

“Yeah. Anyway…” Gabriel cleared his throat. “Call me when you get up to, uh. Maine.” Castiel could hear the amusement battling with concern in his voice.

“I will,” Castiel said.

“I know that tone. Whatever. I’ll call you. And you’d better pick up.”

Castiel pinched the bridge of his nose.

“I will,” he said.

When he rang off the phone, he sat on his sofa quietly for a few seconds - but his apartment was too silent and sitting still gave him too much time to think. He reached for his phone and put on a podcast just so the chatter would fill his mind. No space to worry. No hush to fill with thoughts that snagged and tore.

He went and picked up the roll of tape, like a dog playing fetch with its tail between its legs.


	2. Chapter 2

Castiel sat in the back of the Rolls Royce Cullinan.

The ride was so smooth that he could sit with his head leaning up against the window, staring out. He’d watched the metallic huff and grumble of the city, _his_ city, fading out into suburbia – and then even that petered out. Houses were few, and instead Castiel watched trees flash by through the tinted glass, so many of them so fast like bar codes being swiped over and over.

In his gut, Castiel felt the journey like a weight. He wanted to go back. He wanted to be in his apartment with evening setting in and a scented candle burning, reading up on his latest client’s background or looking up some obscure point of law in one of his books. He wanted to watch Netflix and eat too much pad thai that he’d ordered in. He wanted a bath. He wanted the smell of his place, he wanted blankets on the sofa. He wanted to go out for dinner with his colleagues at Angelus and discuss the latest developments in each of their cases. He wanted to be wearing his suit and tie. He wanted his office. He wanted Bartholomew to give him that single raised eyebrow that meant he was impressed.

He wanted to be Castiel Novak, up-and-coming junior partner at Angelus and Sons. Not whoever he was now, in the back of this ridiculous car with its smooth ride and seats so comfortable it felt like sitting on a breath of air from the lungs of a god.

And outside, trees. Just trees.

“Do you need a stop, sir?” asked the driver, Hannah. Castiel didn’t bother to look at them before answering.

“No.”

“We’re about an hour away. Past the White Mountain National Forest now. Heading up towards...” There was a pause, and Castiel assumed they were checking the car’s satnav display for the name. “The Samarbeid Forest. Hmm. Haven’t heard of it before.”

Castiel said nothing. After an awkward pause, Hannah said,

“Not long now, sir.”

“Thank you.” It was the most Castiel could manage. He glanced towards Hannah, wishing he could summon up more politeness, but he had no words. They were looking back at him in the rearview mirror, and caught his eye before he blinked and looked away.

They were probably wondering what it was that he’d done, Castiel thought. What could a rising star in the legal world have done, to be sitting in the back of someone else’s car dressed for the cold and heading for a house in the middle of nowhere?

He didn’t feel like giving them any answers, even if they’d actually asked instead of watching him with big questioning eyes. Every second made the heaviness in Castiel’s chest weigh harder on him. Like everything since he’d been fired it all felt nightmarish, as though reality had been dropped and he was living in the scattered pieces.

While the trees flitted past, Castiel tried to make himself believe that it could all go back to the way it had been. He could be the person he’d once been again. He could force himself back into the world that had turned its back on him. It would take grit. It would take hard work. It would take courage. But if he didn’t give up, he could have his name on the door of an office again.

He closed his eyes, and passed the time imagining himself going back to the city, being welcomed home. The bowing and scraping of the people who’d acted so mock-sad when they’d heard he’d been fired. The smile on Bartholomew’s face to see his favourite junior partner back in the game.

When Hannah stopped the car, Castiel lifted his head off the window and faced forward.

Out of the front windscreen, he could see it. His house. Blurry-eyed and still chasing back the smooth chrome reassurance of his imaginings, Castiel blinked up at it.

It was wooden, painted in a peeling dark brown and raised up off the forest floor. The porch out the front looked dirtier than it had in the pictures, and one of the windows in the upstairs rooms seemed to have been smashed. Castiel stared at it, and almost expected a flock of bats to come swarming out of the jagged gap.

“This is the place,” Hannah said, sounding sorry about it.

“Yes,” Castiel said. “Thank you.”

He had the keys to the house in his pocket, already picked up from the realtors’ office back in New York. Castiel could feel them digging into his hip, an uncomfortable talisman to the house’s strange world, a reminder that he wasn’t just a visitor to this place – that he belonged here, now. This was where he was going to be living.

“I’ll help get your things in,” Hannah said.

“Oh. Thank you.” Neither of them seemed to be in a rush to leave the car, however. Hannah eyed him from the front seat, waiting for him to get out. Maybe that was just the protocol for a driver, Castiel thought. Maybe he was the only one feeling the grasp of coldness in his throat, the only one half-waiting to see the shadows on the porch start whispering or watch the house windows start to cry red.

It was just a house. It was only a house, and this was only a forest, and he was just a person who lived here. Nothing was wrong with that.

He opened the door of the Cullinan with a respectable clunk.

At once, the wind rushed into the car. Brown leaves licked up at Castiel's shoes as he stepped out, and the sudden breeze tasted at his hair, pulled at his coat, forced him to squeeze his eyes shut against its cutting touch.

Just as quickly, as though it had lost interest, it was gone.

Castiel, windswept, heart pounding, gripped the edge of the car door. He looked back into the palatial and sterile interior of the Cullinan. He could crawl back into its beige comfort, beg Hannah to take him back to New York, beg Gabriel to take him in for a while, beg the realtors to put the house back on the market and sell it, fast, so he could beg a landlord to let him scrape out an existence in a mould-coated, rat-infested one-room apartment.

It sounded, Castiel thought as he stared into the inside of the Cullinan, like a lot of begging.

He looked back up at the house. And back to the car.

And then back to the house. On the porch, something dangling from a beam rattled semi-tunefully.

"Sir?" said Hannah, still sitting in the front seat, watching him through the open door. His hesitation had to be written unmistakably on his face; they were watching him with obvious sympathy. Castiel gritted his teeth, and steeled himself.

"If you could bring a box or two in," he said, "that would be very helpful."

He turned away from the surprise on their face and strode towards the house. On either side of the leafy parking spot in the front there were trees clustered, branches interwoven like clutching hands. The green of their leaves looked sickly and strange.

Castiel walked up the steps to his house. Each one creaked as he put his weight on it - not so much whines of protest as sighs of warning. Hanging down from a beam, Castiel saw what had rattled at him: some kind of strange windchime or mobile with rings of blackened silver, a few jagged little mirrors scabbed over with blackness, dried twisty twigs, some bulbous white garlic, and more ugly dried-up husks of plants and what looked like bones.

It was close. It was _very_ close. Castiel _almost_ turned and left. He was wearing Versace underwear and he needed a bath and he wanted an espresso from his machine in his apartment, and if he got back into the Cullinan he could make everything fit again, he could make his life make sense. He could make it all make sense.

But – no.

He sharpened his resolve.

He could make sense of life here, right here. He had to. He stepped smartly over towards the hanging monstrosity, lifted up the key in his hand, and used its edge to saw through the fraying string holding it aloft. Dust huffed off its length as he worked for a few seconds, and then -

_Thud._

And Castiel looked up, out into the forest, as the wind seemed to pick up and the trees rustled and the leaves skittered. The mobile lay in an unappealing pile on the porch’s wooden flooring at his feet.

There, he told himself. Gone. And every oddity and strangeness about the house was going to be dealt with, just like this one, and he was going to live a nice normal life here in the Samarbeid. Evening was starting to set in so he was just going to unpack a few of his things, make the place habitable for the night, and then set to work on the place properly in the morning.

He took in a breath, and could taste a little salt on the air. He was near the coast, here, he knew – barely a few minutes’ walk, if the maps he’d looked over at the realtors’ office had been right. He couldn’t see the sea through the trees, but he could smell it.

“I’ll set your things down here on the porch, shall I?” said Hannah, coming up behind him. They glanced down at the fallen mobile. One of the bulbs of garlic had split off and rolled away. “Oh,” they said. “Maybe there are vampires living round here.”

“Vampires don’t exist,” Castiel said, a little too firmly.

Hannah gave him an uncertain smile and then awkwardly walked away towards the car, ready to pick up another box. Castiel turned back to face the door of the house, a sturdy-looking thing made of the same wood as the walls.

He slid the key into the lock, and twisted.

There was a little _crack_ from inside the lock, and then a long, low creak as the door opened. Castiel drew in a breath as it swung and groaned, as though about to go underwater.

Quite suddenly, with the door open like a mouth, it was as though all the noise in the forest had been drawn in by its one deep breath. Castiel, used to the sirens and car horns and yells and engine thrums and music and chatter of the city, felt the noiseless moment strike in his chest, as though there were some silent cavity there within him that had been waiting for a fellow hush.

Something in him shared a brief odd song of quiet with the house as it yawned open.

Through the door, he could see a narrow hallway with a grandfather clock at the end and a shabby red rug on the floor. Cobwebs matted the ceiling. The place seemed greyish, half-hearted, with only the dying afternoon light carving a surprised slice of wakefulness out of the dreamy gloom. Castiel gave himself the time it took to blink to gather his courage, and then stepped inside.

The smell of dust blanketed him as he walked in. Every surface he could see - the spindly table by the door, the face of the big clock, the bannister by the stairs - was thick with it. Castiel sniffed in disapproval, and then regretted it.

So much for the cleaning service the realtors had promised would visit before he moved in. He took a moment to stare around. Dust motes floated in the air around him, lit up grey-gold in the light through the door, as he turned slowly on the spot. The walls were clear of mould, at least. The place felt dry, a husk. Utterly still, somewhere beyond sleep. Not decaying – held out of the reach of slimy entropy, like Sleeping Beauty’s palace behind the thorns.

Castiel moved further into the house, finding himself treading lightly as though not wanting to disturb though he knew no one was here. He passed the door to the kitchen first and peeked inside; at least it looked as though it had a fridge and a stove that seemed modern enough. The round, scrubbed wooden table had two comfortable-looking chairs beside it. No coffee maker, though, he thought. And here, again, was another one of those ugly hanging things. Even more silver on this one. Less garlic, but still some. He eyed it distastefully. It probably had bugs living in it. Or bacteria.

Beyond the kitchen was the living room, which was more the worse for wear.

The cushions were in threads and the curtains hung in tatters, their thick brocade sweep still haughty despite the raggedy holes. The sofa was stained dark brown all along one side, and one of the legs was propped up by a book with a ripped spine. Opposite the sofa was a television on a table, and Castiel stared at it. It was just about a cube, almost as long as it was wide - had they even made televisions this clunky since the nineties? In Castiel’s mind swam a picture of his widescreen HD TV that he’d had in his apartment, glossy and slim and mounted on a wall that didn’t have dried-out peeling floral wallpaper.

Castiel thought he’d managed to make up his mind to stay. But this - this was - he couldn’t, could he? He couldn’t stay here. The creepiness that his mind was spinning up was one thing, but this was just unlivable in a purely practical sense. A sofa that looked like it had been hauled out of a junk yard, and a television out of the eighteen hundreds, at the minimum?

He didn’t belong here. He couldn’t be himself here. He was a person who liked evenings in front of the television or lounging on the sofa reading. How was he supposed to lounge on a sofa that clearly had the residue of a federal crime sprinkled across its fraying cushions?

And yet.

He could practically hear Gabriel’s crowing when he heard that Castiel had given up on his decision to live in the forest after less than twenty minutes. He could _hear_ the note of absolute triumph in Gabriel’s voice. _Oh, it didn’t work out? Wow, you surprise me so much. What was it you were saying? I don’t know what you can do? Hmm. Anyway, now that you’re here, call Sarah over. Let me play matchmaker with you two. You know I’ll be able to sort it all out…_

Castiel shuddered.

It wasn’t happening. He was staying. A human didn’t need a nice sofa and a television to live. He left the living room before he could think harder about it than that.

Exploring the bathroom, he was oddly pleased to find the worst thing to be a few cobwebs in the window and a big spider in the bath. What kind of life was he living now, he couldn’t help wondering, where a giant spider seemed like a comparative blessing. He’d get a cup and put it outside later. For the moment, he relieved himself and washed his hands - the water, at least, seemed clean enough - and then went outside to help Hannah grab the last of his boxes out of the back of the car, along with the bags of groceries they’d stopped to pick up on the way. He’d explore the upstairs of the house later.

Outside, he looked down at the stack of his things on the porch, just seven boxes staring with shiny sticky-tape sneers at the grim visage of Castiel’s new house. Everything else Castiel had owned had been donated or thrown away. This was his whole world: seven boxes, some groceries, a creepy house, and nothing else.

“I guess that’s it,” Hannah said, sounding unsure. They brushed their hair out of their eyes.

“Yes,” Castiel said. “Do you… I don’t know whether I could make you some food before you leave, or something to drink…”

“It’s starting to get dark,” they said.

Castiel glanced up towards the sky above the canopy of trees. The gentle blue was dimming to a more ominous purple-grey.

“Yes,” he said again. “Yes. It is.”

“So I should probably head off,” Hannah said. “It’s a long way back to the city.”

“You could always stay the night,” Castiel said. “If you didn’t want to drive so far again.”

“I’ve got an audiobook to listen to,” Hannah said. “I’ll be okay.” Castiel nodded.

“Right,” he said. No company on his first night here, then. That was alright. He’d be fine. Only slightly murdered by ghosts, possibly, maybe.

_Quiet,_ he told the part of his brain that still ran on fantasy novels and not law textbooks.

Hannah gave him a long look, and then said,

“So – look. I don’t know what happened back at Angelus or why you’re out here, but I’m just going to state the obvious for a second, or I’ll feel bad the whole way home. This place is very creepy and I don’t like thinking about you being stuck out here by yourself without even a car to get out. If you want to pack all this stuff back into the Cullinan, you’re welcome to hitch a ride home. I won’t tell Ishim.”

_Home,_ Castiel thought. The city he knew, where he belonged.

He wavered, and then shook his head.

“This is my home now,” he said, and didn’t mean it, but tried to.

“Are you sure?” Hannah gave him an awkward half-smile. “The audiobook is a Terry Pratchett. He’s so funny. Maybe you’d enjoy it.”

Castiel thought he probably would. He’d enjoy it more than spending a night – the first of many – in a house like the one at his back, anyway. But he had bought the place. He was here. He couldn’t just leave.

“Thank you,” he said. “Really. But it’s alright. It’s just a house, and it’s mine. It’ll look different soon.” Castiel looked down towards the mobile he’d cut loose, still sitting just a few feet away on the floor. The bulbous foreheads of garlic, wrinkled over by time, frowned back. “Once I’ve cleaned up. There’s a general store not too far away. And the nearest town is only an hour on foot. If I really need anything, I can use my phone to call for help. I’m all set.”

The words sounded hollow when he said them, but Hannah took him at his word. They nodded and turned back towards the car, the safe bubble of home that hadn’t been popped by the wind or the whispers of the trees or the sight of the beat-up house.

“Take care,” they called back, as they got into the car.

Castiel raised a hand, half in acknowledgement, half in a wave of parting.


	3. Chapter 3

Alone at the house, Castiel moved his boxes into the hallway and then shut his front door.

The dust was cloying, sticking dryly in his throat. With his back to the door, Castiel took a moment to drink in the silence; the shape of his boxes, too neat and square and functional in this musty house of reverie; and the stairs, which he hadn’t climbed yet.

At the top of the staircase was a window, which sent scurrying trickles of light down their length.

Rather than going up those stairs right now, Castiel thought, he would have preferred to perform a one-man sword-swallowing show to a crowd of a thousand hostile grizzly bears plus everyone from his old law firm. But worse than going upstairs would be not going upstairs, and trying to unpack his things and cook his dinner with that empty space being filled up in his head by the worst his imagination could throw at him.

He put his foot on the first step. It didn’t creak or even murmur under his weight. One hand on the bannister, into the cushion of dust. And he began to climb.

Looking down at his feet to make sure not to trip on the unfamiliar steps, he made his way upward. The stairway was straightforward, no curve to reach the upper landing – but even still the way felt strange, twisty, with curlicues of shadow seeming to bend and linger in odd shapes at the sides of his vision. Castiel glanced left and right at them, blinking hard, annoyed at his own eyes.

He half-tripped over the top step. There was no laughter from the dark of the landing, only silence, but that didn’t feel quite right. As though there should have been a hiss of laughter. There ought to have been. The silence wasn’t smooth. It was a scooped-out gap, where something should have sounded.

Castiel breathed out, just to fill a little of the emptiness. Nothing answered his sigh, and it was like a person deep in sleep not answering to their name. The wrongness of it was making Castiel’s heart pound. He tried to shake off the feeling.

He was being ridiculous. What, did he _want_ the house to be haunted, now? With firmer footsteps than normal, he stomped across the landing and pushed open the door opposite him.

Another bathroom. No spider, but still cobwebs, and an unpleasantly yellow bath mat. The window was the one that had looked smashed from the outside – but standing here now, Castiel could see that it just had a splatter of something black and dry plastered across the glass.

And – as it swung around to face him, Castiel went still.

There was a flat circle hanging from the centre of the ceiling, on a piece of transparently thin thread. Approaching it, Castiel lifted up his hand – hesitated – and then touched it.

It felt like ceramic. On the roughness of its disk were painted five concentric circles: black, blue, white, black, blue, from inside to out. Castiel held it against his palm for a second.

Then, abruptly, he tugged on it. The thread snapped. He nodded to himself. Whatever the thing was, he wasn’t going to live with it hanging in his bathroom, the circles watching him like a single eye. Matter-of-factly, he moved to the next room.

The master bedroom was big, with a double bed, and for the first time since seeing the kitchen Castiel wondered whether perhaps he actually hadn’t made such a big mistake in coming here. The windows were wide and led onto a little balcony off the back of the house, and the ceiling sloped on one side with exposed beams making strange triangle shadows against the white paint.

Hanging from the beam over the bed were more of the discs – lots more. Castiel looked up at them, at least twenty all staring unblinkingly back, and in the centre of them was another mobile hung with garlic and mirrors and silver and bone. Definitely bone, Castiel thought, looking for a long time at this one. He gritted his teeth and then, in a quick movement, got up onto the bed without bothering to take his shoes off, and started pulling down the circles. The threads snapped easily, and the ceramics tinkled and tapped together as he swayed on the bed, tugging them down with one hand and holding them in the other. The mobile he unhooked more gently from its nail hammered into the side of the beam, careful not to let any fraying garlic skin fall onto the bed.

He walked over to the doors that led out to the balcony, opened them with his free hand, and dumped the whole lot of decorations outside in an unceremonious pile.

The only other room upstairs was a dark little utility closet with a high, tiny square window, which Castiel opened, peered into, winced at the spider population, and then closed.

He breathed out. He’d done it. He’d gone all the way through the house, and found nothing more worrying than some odd interior design choices and the local eight-legged populace.

His stomach grumbled. Castiel headed back down the stairs. He watched where he put his feet, this time, and didn’t let the running shadows distract him. Were they moving faster than before? Were they darker?

Castiel shrugged it off. It was all in his head. He just needed to eat.

––

The sink in the kitchen didn’t have running water, and when Castiel opened up the cupboard to have a look, he discovered that the plumbing looked about a century old. He stared at it, trying to tease apart the mystery of its curling blueish pipes for a whole ten seconds before shrugging and going to get water to cook with from the bathroom tap. He’d washed his hands in there before and, sure enough, the water came out clear from the faucet.

The pot he’d filled was bubbling on the stove, and he was about to add pasta, when a little voice in his head said,

_Water from a bathroom tap is drinkable... isn’t it?_

Castiel hesitated.

He stared down at the water, simmering away innocently. It looked clean. Boiling it would make it clean too, wouldn’t it? Maybe?

With a sigh, he put the pasta down, turned off the heat on the stove, and went to the freezer to retrieve the pizza he’d bought. He went to one of his boxes and found a knife, which he used to slit open the plastic packaging around the pizza. He’d hoped to store his frozen food in case of emergency – but _possibility of bugs in the water_ seemed like plenty enough of an emergency. He turned on the oven and shoved the pizza in without waiting for it to heat up, and then started pacing the downstairs of the house restlessly, trying to get used to it, make it feel familiar.

In the living room, he found another one of those mobiles. It was tucked away behind a bookshelf in a corner, almost out of sight. He stared at it malevolently for a few seconds, and then he went and retrieved his scissors from the top of one of his boxes, and snipped its string. It felt heavy and ugly in his hand. In a few steps, he was at the window; with one hand, he unlatched it and pushed it open, and dropped the mobile out. It landed with a thump on the bed of leaves outside.

There. Better. And he’d feel better still when he had some pizza inside him.

He peered out of the window, into the gloom. Night was almost total, now. The forest looked lumpen and strange, and he could hear creatures starting to sing somewhere out in its depths. Maybe tomorrow he could go and look for them. The shrieking and calling wouldn’t sound so eerie if he could see the thing that made the noise, and know it wasn’t so big and bad, not really –

Castiel made a noise of surprise. He’d rested his fingers on the sill of the window, and they’d touched something soft and grainy – he looked down, and saw a few tiny white crystals stuck to his fingertips. Squatting down to look at the sill, he saw a line all along the edge of white powder.

He frowned. The immediate urge was to taste it. The second thought was that it might be some kind of drug. But what sort of drug-user would leave their stash in a line, up against the glass of a window? Tentatively, Castiel raised his finger to his lips, and licked at one of the crystals.

He wrinkled his nose.

Salt.

With his head on one side, he considered what he was seeing. A little border of salt, poured along the sill on the inside of his living room window.

His mind felt as though it were in a fog after the day’s driving. What he was looking at felt like an exhibition in an abstract gallery, _Window with Salt,_ not something from his own life. His mind couldn’t make the scene his own. Was he starting to truly lose his grip, he wondered, as he stared.

There were shadows moving outside the window. Just trees, trees in dream, Castiel told himself. Maybe he’d never been fired. Maybe this was all a nightmare, his sleeping mind’s slow horrorshow, while he slept in his room in his city. The salt grains felt sharp on his fingers.

In the kitchen, he heard a pleasant little _beep._

The oven was up to temperature, then. Castiel took in a sharp breath, and did his best to brush off the sensation of unreality. Maybe the salt was just a cleaning technique that he didn’t know about. He could call up the realtors in the morning and ask. For another second or so, he stared down at the salt line. In the place where he’d touched it, there was a gap.

He had to check his pizza.

Pizza, in all of this, was something that made sense.

As he walked back through to the kitchen, he took out his phone. He couldn’t make this house stop being creepy, but maybe if he put on some music and sorted out a delicious cheesy feast for himself, he could at least make the creepiness feel secondary to the cosiness. Banish the fog inside his head.

He opened his music app.

He’d always meant to use it more, but had never got around to making himself playlists of his own music. Instead, he browsed through the ones he’d downloaded before leaving the city. He wanted something loud, something to fill up all the empty spaces in this awful house and make it feel less as though there might be room in the shadows for anything to be watching. Pop music wasn’t going to do it. Metal was a possibility, though the few songs he’d ever listened to had set his teeth on edge. The words _Classic Rock_ leapt out at him as he reached the kitchen counter and leaned against it; with a swift tap of his thumb, he hit _Shuffle Play._

The groans and high-pitched cries from the forest, and the throbbing hush of the house, were drowned out by the fast, metallic strum of electric guitar strings. Castiel set his phone down on the counter beside him, turning the volume all the way up.

_Whole Lotta Love,_ read the screen, which he glanced at before bending down to open up the oven. When he tugged at the door it yawned open, the hot air rushing out to blast his face. If he’d been hoping that the music or the smell of food would ground him, ease the sense of strangeness and floating above himself, he’d been wrong. The loudness of the song was clattering against ears that didn’t want to hear it. The pizza inside the oven was bubbling greasily and the heat felt dully painful on his eyes the longer he watched it, so he shut the door. His breaths were coming a little too quickly in his chest. He swallowed hard, looking around the kitchen. He needed something – something – he didn’t know what, something to ease everything, to make it all calm down, to bring him back to himself.

He jerked around, straightening up. Under the music, he could have sworn he’d heard someone crying out. He took a few steps towards the kitchen table. The room was empty, and so still, but somehow in the very air itself there was a frantic movement, a whirling tightening overwhelming rush, and he couldn’t see it or hear it or even feel it but he thought it was there and he thought it was getting closer, and his phone kept saying,

_Whole lotta love… Whole lotta love…_

Castiel covered his ears.

In his head, so suddenly, there was a fog – there was a scream, there were shadows, there was a rushing panicked pounding frantic fearful wet alive and furious movement. And he couldn’t back away or run from it.

It was in his head, and all around him, and there was, so very suddenly, absolutely nowhere to go. He was lost. He was done. He was a tiny pinprick of consciousness clinging like a spider in a bathroom to the edge of his own mind. And everywhere there was a wind-quick hurricane darkness crushing and smothering him, and –

And then, shaking his body from his feet upward, he felt something strike the floor behind him.

_Boom._

The rushing furor stopped.

The kitchen went silent, except for the tinny innocent sound of Castiel’s phone playing a song he didn’t know.

Castiel breathed for a second.

That – had that been a panic attack? All inside his head? His chest had felt so tight. His head so foggy, and hanging loose from reality like a door swinging off its hinge.

He wondered for the second time that evening whether he was losing his grip. He put a hand up to his face, and slowly rubbed it flat and palm-first over one closed eye and up into his hair. Breathe, that was the key. Breathing slowly. And getting himself some food to steady everything.

He turned around to fetch his pizza, and gave a sharp yell of surprise.

Standing there behind him, staring right at him, was a man.

A man.

In his kitchen.

A tall man.

With brown hair, and green eyes, and freckles visible on his tanned white skin. A man wearing simple clothes, the kind of thing Castiel would expect to see on someone out in the forest so late. A man who seemed to be looking at Castiel with an expression full of confusion.

Castiel glanced towards the kitchen counter. There was the knife there, the one that he’d used to open up the pizza packaging.

“Who are you?” the man said.

Castiel started to edge towards the knife.

“What are you doing here?” The man’s voice was deep and not unpleasant, and his tone didn’t sound aggressive so much as urgent, but he was still a strange man in Castiel’s kitchen who had apparently broken in. Castiel moved closer to the knife.

“Who are _you?”_ Castiel replied. “Why are you in my kitchen?”

“Your kitchen?” The man narrowed his eyes at Castiel. He was good-looking, Castiel thought, and then pulled a face at himself in his own mind. Not the time.

“My kitchen,” Castiel repeated.

“You… you live here now?”

“I bought it,” Castiel said. He’d made it to within reaching distance of the counter where the knife was lying. The man was slowly swivelling to keep facing him.

“Are you one of us?” the man demanded. “Is that why you had the wards removed?”

Castiel went still. The wards? What on earth were wards?

And then the thought occurred to him. Maybe this man wasn’t in his right mind.

Castiel stopped angling for the knife. If the man needed help, a knife wouldn’t make the situation better.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, deliberately making his tone flat and calm. “Are you alright? Are you lost? Do you need help getting to your home?”

The man had started to look around the room, his expression tense.

“Look,” he said. “I can’t hold her off for long. Do you have the wards?”

“Hold her off?”

“The friend you were making before I arrived,” the man said, his eyes ranging across the room, lingering in the corners behind Castiel. “You should probably get behind me, whoever you are. Or…” He glanced over his shoulder, out towards the hallway. “Crap. _Crap._ How many of the damn wards did you get rid of? Not all of them?”

“What are wards?” Castiel asked, completely lost. There was something about the man’s tone that was throwing Castiel off. It should have felt as though the man had one foot out of reality, with the way that he was talking – but instead Castiel had the overwhelming sensation that it was the man who was making sense, and it was he himself who was missing something.

The man hissed through his teeth.

“Is there anywhere in the house where you left them up,” he said urgently. He started to move towards Castiel, one arm out, eyes still on the doorway through to the hall. Castiel could feel shadows moving in his mind again. He could feel tightness in his chest again.

He backed away from the man, who stopped and turned to him, looking him dead in the eye.

“Listen,” he said. “Feel that weight on your mind? Feel the darkness in your head? The way you can’t breathe? Think that’s natural?” He didn’t break eye contact as he held out his hand. “I won’t make you. But you should come with me.”

“Why?” Castiel said, his hand already halfway to the man’s.

“Because,” the man said. “I like your music, and if you don’t come with me, you’re probably not going to be listening to it again.”

It was a mistake. It _had_ to be a mistake. Surely he was just feeding into this man’s delusions at best, and actively putting himself into the hands of a violent stranger at worst.

But there was something in the man’s green eyes that struck Castiel. Hit him in that place in his chest, the silent space, the calm.

In the quiet was trust.

And trust looked like Castiel’s hand grabbing the man’s, and the man tightening his grip around it, and pulling him out of the kitchen.

“Back,” the man said, in a low angry voice, as they walked down the hallway. “Back. He’s mine. He’s _mine._ ”

The man’s footsteps sounded strange on the floor, loud and echoey. Castiel stared into the dark beyond him down the hallway, but could see nothing except shadows. His pulse was racing. His breath was coming harder and harder and in his mind, he was shrinking – he was tiny, he was impossibly small, he was a flea on the back of a great black huge nothing –

_“Mine,”_ the man growled. And the feeling receded, just enough that Castiel could feel his feet moving, as the man pulled him up the stairs. Laughing shadows licked at his shoes, he could see them – it was impossible, he couldn’t be seeing them, he could _not_ be hearing them. His head was splitting.

“Wards,” the man said. “Wards. The circles with the eyes, the garlic, the silver… anything. In here?” They were next to the bathroom. Castiel shook his head. “Here?” The bedroom.

“No,” Castiel said. “They’re outside the –”

The man swore viciously, and Castiel looked up to see him staring at something over Castiel’s own shoulder. Before he could whip round to look, the man’s grip on his hand was tugging him away, towards the third and last door upstairs: the little closet.

“No,” Castiel said, “no, there aren’t any in there. What are we even running away fr…”

He turned to look over his shoulder, just as, behind him, he heard the man fling open the door to the closet.

Castiel turned to look, and he _saw._

He tried not to. He didn’t want to see the pale body, robed in shadow. He didn’t want to see the gaping mouth, the empty eyes, the grasping hands. He didn’t want to see the way the shaded folds of its clothing danced and spat and screamed and laughed with tiny fanged mouths, the way they rippled over each other and swirled and moved but bound to the central point of that horrific white body – they were rats in a rat king, and the corpse at their heart leaned forward and drew in a breath and Castiel felt his lungs go stiff as iron. Felt his mind go dark and cold. Felt –

Felt a hand press against his arm, just below his shoulder, pulling him back and away. He had his eyes open and he couldn’t see. He had his mouth open and he couldn’t breathe. He heard a door slam.

_Gasp._

He drew in air.

Unsteady, blinking away the shade that had swallowed him, he was held up by a wall behind him and something else against his front, something warm that moved. Castiel shook his head, and squeezed his eyes shut, and then opened them.

The man.

He was standing in front of Castiel, facing him. The closet was small enough that their chests were pressed together. His green eyes were on Castiel’s. By the light that filtered through the gap around the door and the gloom filtering in through the tiny window, Castiel could just see him.

As Castiel watched, he brought a finger to his lips.

Castiel nodded.

Outside the closet, he heard a footfall, and then a dragging sound. And then another. Coming up close to the closet door.

He pressed his lips tight shut. His mind was clear and he could breathe, but he knew, now. He knew what was out there. He knew the wretched pale ghoulish face of it. He’d seen it move. He’d seen it look. He’d seen it _be,_ undeniably, unless he had lost his mind and this was all some kind of cruel hallucination that his mind had visited on him.

Quite suddenly, he felt convinced that if he could only make some kind of sound – could speak, say something normal or silly or not-scary, something that a person being chased by a monster would never say, then he could make it all go away. Like the gentle _beep_ of the oven, earlier, that had pulled him out of the dark.

He opened his mouth, drew in a breath – he thought he heard the press of wet white hands against the closet door – and then against his own lips was the press of a different palm. Dry, warm. The man looked fiercely into his eyes, and pressed harder.

Castiel swallowed. There was no escaping this. No quick sound spell to magic him back to a world that made sense. No noise he could make that would undo what was outside the door.

He nodded. The man didn’t let go.

Seconds ticked.

A spider dropped from the ceiling of the closet, swinging on a silver thread. Castiel remembered how many of them were above them, and didn’t look up. He couldn’t help watching the single one that hung over the man’s shoulder, long legs always moving.

Outside the closet, a shuddering rattle. And then a footstep, but further from the door, and then another. The thing – whatever it was – moved back six paces, and then its steps changed. Castiel heard them go hollow, still receding.

And then they were gone.

The man slowly moved his hand away from Castiel’s face.

“Still quiet,” he said, barely above a whisper. “Don’t move.”

Castiel was too numb to move. Too numb to shake or yell or do any of the things that he thought he should be doing. His mind wasn’t taking it in. He looked into the man’s eyes.

“What…” He licked his lips. His mouth was so dry. “What was that thing?” he asked. He couldn’t have spoken above a whisper if he’d wanted to.

“A revenant,” the man said. “It’s changed since I last saw it. Looked more like a draugr to me than anything else. Other things thrown in too. That’s how it mostly goes these days.”

Castiel didn’t understand. He swallowed hard.

“Why are we – why didn’t it come in here?”

The man reached up a hand, and without looking, held it underneath the spider that had rappelled from the ceiling. The spider touched his hand with the tip of one of its legs.

“Spiders,” the man said. “The webs. They’re a ward against her. Not the strongest, but enough to turn something dark away for a while.” Castiel looked up. The thick blanket of cobwebs was silvery in the gloom, speckled with its dark long-legged weavers. “But it’ll be called back by signs of life. Movement, light. Sound. We need to find the stronger wards. It’s probably just for dark things but they might push me out, too. But you’ll be safe inside.”

When he spoke, Castiel could feel the man’s breath on his own face. It took him a few muzzy seconds to take in what he was saying.

“Push you out too?” he said. “Wh- are you – are you – are you something like – like that thing? Out there?”

As Castiel stared at the man, he felt the space in the closet go suddenly tight. Not dark, not shadowy – but with real, physical warmth, the two of them felt pressed closer together, uncomfortably so.

“No,” the man said hurriedly. “No, no, it’s okay. It’s all okay. I’m nothing like one of them. I’m just me. Just Dean. Look at me. It’s fine.”

Castiel took a breath. It was fine. It was all fine. This man wasn’t a monster. He was just a person. A person named Dean. Nothing strange could be called Dean. It was a solid name.

“I’m Castiel,” Castiel said.

Dean stared at him for a long second.

“Okay,” he said carefully. “First rule. Wards in the house stay up. Second rule. No telling your name to anyone or anything else you meet. Especially not if they ask for it. I’m just gonna call you Cas.”

“Cas?” Castiel repeated doubtfully.

“Given names can be taken,” Dean said slowly, as though talking to a child. “The more of you that’s in a name, the more of you they take along with it. If you don’t like Cas, that’s perfect.”

For a second, they stared at each other. With the immediate horror fading slowly, trickling away like black bathwater down the drain, Castiel found himself really looking at Dean for the first time.

Dean looked right back.

Castiel swallowed.

“Why did you help me,” he said, still in a barely-there whisper. “How did you know… how…”

“I told you,” Dean said. “I liked your music. I heard it, saw the wards were down, thought I’d come in and see what was happening.”

“So you just walked in?”

“I mean. Could’ve left you to the revenant, if you’d have preferred its company more than mine…”

“No. I just… I thought I was the only person for miles.”

“More out in the forest than you’d think,” Dean said. “What… can I smell?”

Castiel took in a breath. Inside his mind, he swore.

“My pizza,” he said.

“You got pizza? Pizza and Led Zeppelin?”

“Um.” Castiel wasn’t sure what Dean was getting at. “Yes.”

“We need to get down there.” Dean pressed his lips together. “Okay. It’s been long enough. Tell me where the wards are.”

Castiel thought of the dragging shadow monster, and felt his throat close up.

“We’re… going out there?” he managed.

“I am. You aren’t.”

“What?” Castiel said, sounding more concerned than he’d meant to. But this man had burst into his kitchen and grabbed his hand and, so far as Castiel could see, had saved him from a waking nightmare. The last thing he wanted to think about was this same man going out to face that horror again.

“I got it. Don’t even worry.”

Into Castiel’s mind flashed a memory. Dean walking him down the hall, their hands linked. Dean growling, _mine._ And the shadows falling back.

Maybe he did got it, Castiel thought.

“The wards are on the balcony,” he said. “Outside the bedroom. And downstairs, outside the front door. And outside the living room window.” As Dean moved to leave, he found himself reaching for Dean’s hand, the motion feeling natural after they’d held hands through the house – only curtailed by Castiel’s last-second memory that they’d only just met, and it wasn’t usually the way things were done.

Even still, his fingertips brushed the back of Dean’s hand, and Dean stopped. He looked back, his expression a little unfriendly in its confusion.

“Don’t get hurt,” Castiel said.

Dean grinned, with only a touch of humour.

“Don’t get bitten by a spider,” he replied, and then swung the door open, left, and slammed it shut behind him.

In the darkness, Castiel breathed. He closed his eyes and took in deep, long draws of air. He felt it hit the bottom of his lungs. Across his mind flashed an image of the – the thing, whatever it was. Revenant, that was the word Dean had used.

Dean. Who – who even was Dean? What had he been doing in the forest? How had he known to come inside and offer Castiel his help?

Every question felt like gently falling snow over Castiel’s numb mind.

Revenant. Revenant. It was out there. Dean was putting up the – the wards, the things that had been hanging in the house. Keeping it at bay, Castiel realised now. Those shadows that had seemed to move, the ones that had rushed and scurried as he’d gone up and down the stairs, they’d been it. Or a part of it.

He had to get out. He had to go. But how? Where?

The door to the closet swung open. Castiel realised that he was backed up against the wall of the closet again, looking like a cornered animal. Dean had been looking matter-of-fact, but his expression softened when he saw Castiel’s tense face.

Castiel lifted his chin up, and stood straight, and said in his strongest possible voice,

“Is it gone?”

“Gone,” Dean said. “All the wards are back up. I did the ones downstairs. And… I took your pizza out the oven. It was gonna burn.”

Castiel stared at him. There were so many questions in his mind that he didn’t know where to begin, and he didn’t know if he _wanted_ to begin. Maybe it was better just to not know any of it. Maybe he could try to forget about tonight. Go back to living as though things like a revenant didn’t exist, and no handsome green-eyed strangers to save him, either.

“You… okay?” Dean said. “I swear, there’s nothing to be scared of. Come out and see.”

Castiel saw the way his hand stretched just slightly, down by his side. He didn’t reach for Castiel. Their skin didn’t so much as brush, not this time. Castiel still felt it.

He stepped out of the closet. Together, he and Dean moved across the landing, with Castiel pausing to peer into the bedroom and the bathroom. Nothing, other than the wards hanging where they had been before he’d removed them.

They went downstairs. Still in silence, in the quiet and the dark. The stairs made hollow sounds under Dean’s feet. Castiel wondered what his shoes were made of. He wondered what Dean was thinking.

He wondered what he, himself, was thinking. Somehow focusing on Dean and imagining what he might have going through his head was much easier than turning inward, and trying to face what he saw inside. The face of the revenant, round and round.

At the bottom of the stairs, Castiel took in a breath. He could smell pizza.

“Would…” Castiel swallowed. His mouth was still so dry. “Would you like some of the pizza?”

Again, Castiel found himself on the receiving end of a look that seemed more than slightly incredulous.

“Rule three,” Dean said. “If anything asks you for food, give them exactly what they ask for. No more and no less. But don’t damn well offer it around. You’re greener than a katydid.”

“I do feel nauseous,” Castiel admitted.

“No, like – like you don’t know what you’re doing,” Dean said.

“Oh,” Castiel said.

And then he caught Dean’s eye, and something in Castiel unclenched. He wasn’t in a horror story anymore. Both of them were almost smiling and looking away. Something so simple as a moment of humour over a misunderstanding, and they were just two people in a hallway, suddenly. Just two figures in the almost-dark, gilded in warm light from the kitchen.

“I should go,” Dean said. “But thanks for the offer.”

He started to move towards the front door.

“Wait,” Castiel said, the word blurted out. “Wait, but – you saved my life.”

Dean looked over his shoulder at Castiel.

“It happens,” he said, with a movement that could have been a shrug.

“You can’t just leave…”

“I’m going to,” Dean said, a little more coolly.

“I want to thank you somehow,” Castiel said. _Don’t leave me here alone,_ his mind said. _It might come back._ “Do you live nearby? Could I – I don’t know – see you again?”

The way he’d phrased it, or maybe it was his tone of voice, was a teenager asking his crush if they could have a second date. And Castiel thought that he had to be the only one who would have heard it, the only one paying attention to himself that much – except Dean raised an eyebrow, and his smile returned, a little more winning.

“You wanna see me again?” he said.

Castiel didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know if he had it in him to answer warmly, like he might have done if he and Dean had met in a bar in Manhattan. But it felt cold, like a snub, to say, _yes, of course, I want answers about what just happened, I want to understand it and there’s no one else to turn to, there’s only you and me out here so obviously that’s why I want to see you again._

Before he could formulate a response, Dean’s smile had faded.

“Come back,” Castiel said. It was easier to talk to him when he wasn’t smiling.

“When?”

“When you can.”

Dean’s eyes flickered over his face, as though trying to parse something he wasn’t understanding. Castiel didn’t know how to make it easier for him. He was a puzzle to himself, right now.

“It’ll be gone so long as you keep the wards up,” Dean said, stepping towards the door.

“But is it out there?” Castiel said.

Dean opened Castiel’s front door and then turned back to look at him one more time. There was something in the green of his eyes, the curve of his grin in the half-light, the slight touch of glee at the edge of his expression, that wasn’t quite – it wasn’t quite right, somehow.

“Everything is,” Dean said. And then he left, leaving the door swinging open behind him.

When Castiel went to close it, he couldn’t help looking outside through the narrowing gap between the door and its frame. The trees were sturdy silhouettes in the gloom; the sky was a riot of stars above. In the patch of damp mud that he and Hannah had worn as they walked from the car to the house moving boxes, he could see the hoofprints of some kind of animal.

He shut it all out. He walked back to his kitchen and his dinner. He walked right over the prints that Dean had left on the dusty floor.


	4. Chapter 4

Morning came unwillingly, slouching into Castiel’s bedroom through his windows. It left grimy grey light over the wards that hung above him, and breathed a moist tang into the air.

Castiel breathed in and out steadily, his eyes closed. In dream, he saw a green-eyed, freckled face.

Dean was staring at him. They were standing in his apartment in New York, he knew they were, but it looked empty and pale and different to how he’d left it.

“Who are you?” Castiel said. Dean’s silhouette on the wall behind him was different. Dean was trying to catch his eye but Castiel leaned around him to try to look at the shadow. From the top of his head, one on each side, there was a pattern – strange branches, growing outward.

“Who are you?” Castiel asked again. Dean opened his mouth.

“Who’s Sarah?” he said.

Castiel jolted upright in bed.

It took a frantic moment of staring around the room to remember where he was. The beams, the window to the balcony… the wards.

He groaned and pressed his hands to his eyes against the dull morning light, bringing his knees up almost to his chest. He’d hoped, as he’d started to drop off to sleep the night before, that it might all feel strange and vague and dreamlike in the morning. That he might be able to chalk it up to some kind of hallucination induced by licking salt laced with some form of PCP from the window sill.

The memory of it was sharp. He had no sensation of coming down from a high, or even a fever. And besides, he’d seen enough cases of drug use in his time as a prosecutor to know that he hadn’t been on any kind of hallucinogen the night before.

It had been real.

The revenant.

And Dean.

Castiel flopped back onto his pillows.

Obviously, he had to leave. He’d stayed last night because there had been no chance he was going to try to head out into the forest alone in the dark, and he hadn’t called Hannah to ask them to come back because – well, the wards had been up, and – and he hadn’t wanted to sound as though he’d snapped, and have them tell Ishim, who would tell everyone at his old law firm.

He hadn’t called his brother, either. His reasoning on that one had been less firm. In the middle of the night, full of pizza and exhausted, it had felt like a good idea to try to get some sleep. Now, Castiel was thinking about how if he’d only called Gabriel last night, he could’ve been being picked up right now.

Not that he’d have left before he saw Dean, obviously. He needed to see him. He needed answers.

He patted the sheets, and finally came up with his phone, a solid comfortable rectangle in his hand. He tapped to unlock it, and then opened his call app and scrolled to his brother’s number.

There was only one ring before the call was picked up.

“Well, well, well,” Gabriel said. “What’s up? Calling to gloat about how you’re still there?”

Castiel touched the tip of his tongue to the edge of his top lip for a moment.

“Not exactly,” he said, after too long a pause.

Something clattered in the background on the call. Castiel knew that noise – his brother’s keys falling to the ground in his hallway, where he always let them lie until he needed to go out. The amount of times that Castiel had told him to get a table to put the keys on, before he’d left the city.

“Wait,” Gabriel was saying. “Wait. You’re kidding. You’re giving up already?”

Castiel said nothing.

“Oh,” Gabriel said, sounding thrilled. “Oh, wow. You know, I really thought that it would be at least two whole days. What was it? The lack of a bath? Something icky get on your Versaces?”

Teeth clenched, Castiel didn’t reply.

“I knew you couldn’t do it. I _knew_ it. So, when do you want me to come give my sweet precious baby brother a ride home? Should I leave now?”

_Yes,_ said Castiel’s common sense desperately. _Yes. It doesn’t matter if he teases you. Hello? Revenant? Revenant is worse than teasing, right?_

“No,” Castiel said. His common sense smacked its hand against its forehead.

“Oh?”

“Don’t come,” Castiel said. “I’m fine. I just wanted to let you know I arrived safely and spent a good night.”

“Shame,” Gabriel said. “I was kinda looking forward to my trip up to the ol’ Forest.” He said it in a hokey, woodfolk-y accent.

“Save it,” Castiel said shortly. “I’m going to go get breakfast.”

“Don’t forget about the job doing forest things,” Gabriel said, all fake sincerity. “Very important.”

“Shut up, Gabriel,” Castiel said. Gabriel laughed. It was rare that Castiel showed so clearly that his brother had got under his skin, and he cursed himself.

“Okay, okay. Call me if you need me though, yeah?”

“Alright.” Castiel hung up.

_Well,_ said his common sense, _you screwed that right up. All the way. Up and down. Totally screwed it._

“I know,” Castiel said to himself, and threw off the covers. Yes, he could called Hannah and accept the texts and calls of derision from crowing former colleagues. Yes, he could call his brother back. Yes, he could call a taxi, though he had no money for a long ride, and the only way he’d have enough money would be to take the taxi directly to his brother’s house and ask him to pay it, and that would be a thousand times worse than just calling his brother back.

But _no_.

He could do those things, and all of them were tempting in their own way, but he wasn’t going to do them. What he was going to do was, he was going to go and have his breakfast. And then he was going to – to unpack.

He was going to unpack his things. It wasn’t as though there were many of them, so they could easily be packed up again once he’d worked out a way to get out of here that didn’t involve total humiliation. And the revenant wasn’t getting back inside, anyway, with the wards up. And he was going to set up his WiFi router, and he was going to send Gabriel a picture of his unpacked boxes. His new home. Even if it didn’t last until the evening, he was going to have a moment of triumph.

First he had to get out of bed.

The hard and slightly lumpy mattress had become his island of safety at some point during the night, a flotation device above the depths of the rest of the house and the outside world. Castiel shuffled to the edge of the bed, and extended a foot.

He lowered it towards the floor, half expecting a clawed pale hand to whip out from beneath the bed frame and grab his ankle – but nothing happened. His foot reached the floor. He pressed his toes against the rug. It felt worn down and shabby, soft with dust.

He was going to clean, too. Clean and unpack. He was determined.

And he made his breakfast with determination – a bowl of cereal. No coffee to go with it, because he wasn’t sure about the water.

So he called the realtors with determination. Asked about the water and found out that the bathroom tap and the kitchen tap were fed from the same source, so the bathroom water was safe to drink. And he asked, without quite being able to help himself, about the previous owner of the house.

“We can’t give you any information about that, sir,” said the woman on the end of the phone, sounding unconcerned.

“Not – not even why they chose to leave? Or when?”

“I can tell you when. It was two years ago.” There was a strange clicking sound. Castiel wondered if she was cleaning her teeth with a nail.

“I see,” Castiel said. “And they didn’t – it wasn’t because – I mean, they moved, did they? Or did they… die?”

“They moved, sir,” said the woman, sounding exhausted to the point that Castiel had to wonder how many hesitant questions from owners of possibly-haunted houses she had to field on a daily basis.

“Ah. Right. Thank you.” He rang off, and then sighed when he realised he’d forgotten to ask about the cleaning company.

It didn’t matter, he decided. It wasn’t as though there could be a cleaning company close enough to come and tidy the place for him this morning, and he wanted it done by noon. He wanted everything done by noon.

He wanted Dean to have arrived by noon.

Or maybe he wanted Dean to arrive after, so that he could be impressed by the difference Castiel had made to the house. That could work. Castiel thought he wouldn’t mind seeing Dean’s eyebrows go up, looking pleasantly surprised by what Castiel had managed to do – instead of silently incredulous about what he’d managed to do, in a very bad way, which was mostly what he’d seemed to be feeling the night before.

There were no real cleaning supplies in the house that he could find and Castiel wasn’t intending to walk the hour to find the nearest convenience store, so instead he filled the deepest cooking pot he had with water and dish soap. For a cloth he delved into one of his boxes and pulled out items of his own clothing, dismissing them all as too necessary until his hand touched something so soft that it was almost slippery.

His hand stilled.

No. Not the Versace. He kept digging, and finally settled on a plain white t-shirt that he wore often, but which wasn’t irreplaceable.

Armed with his makeshift weapons against the dirt, he set to it. Every surface he could find, he wiped down. The water in his pot was filthy within minutes, and the greater part of his morning was spent wandering to and from the bathroom, filling it up and pouring it away again and again as he worked through the rooms. Hallway, cleaned. Bannister, cleaned. Landing, cleaned. Upstairs bathroom, bedroom, cleaned. And – Castiel opened the door to the closet, and looked up at the spiders.

He lowered his dripping white t-shirt, though it was more brown than white at this point. The spiders weren’t to be touched. Still, he could give the contents of the closet a wipe down, he thought. He hadn’t had much time to look at them properly, the night before. Just a few boxes stacked against the back wall, and some plastic bags all stuffed into one plastic bag, and –

Castiel drew in a breath. There. Behind the boxes. Something he didn’t think he’d be lucky enough to see here.

A vacuum cleaner.

Lifting it out of the closet carefully, Castiel found the nearest outlet and plugged it in. When he turned it on, the whine of it filled his ears. Big, clunky, old and grimy, but it _worked._

He worked his way through the house, feeling a sensation growing inside him with every room that he vacuumed. Hearing the little bits of dirt rattle as they were sucked up, and seeing a swathe of clean floor where he’d passed. The sensation he felt was strange, like a warmth, a sun growing inside him. He started to hum as he worked. He thought about nothing but the cleanliness of the floor.

It was only when he was done, and emptying the dusty vacuum off the edge of his porch, that he realised he was happy.

He walked back into his house, and looked around. The red rug had a new verve to it; the bannister shone in the light through the door. The grandfather clock said,

_Tick._

Castiel eyed it.

_Tock,_ it said, eventually.

Somehow, this only made his warm sun hotter and bigger.

“I’ll wind you up,” Castiel told the clock, “when I’m done cleaning the living room and the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom.”

The grandfather clock did not reply to this. Castiel didn’t mind. He went back upstairs to get his pot of dirty soapy water and his t-shirt from the closet. Yes, he’d tackle the dirtier surfaces in the downstairs rooms that he hadn’t managed to vacuum clean, and then he’d wind the clock, and then he’d eat lunch. He could have that pasta, now.

How was the idea of pasta making him so happy?

It didn’t make sense. He’d been menaced by a monster the night before. He’d faced his own mortality. And yet – it was undeniable.

He thought maybe he’d like to read his book later. After Dean had come, perhaps.

Castiel gave the spiders a little awkward smile as he closed the door to their closet, and went back downstairs.


	5. Chapter 5

It reached six in the afternoon before the thought occurred to Castiel that perhaps Dean simply wouldn’t come.

As he’d left, Dean hadn’t even said that he would come back. But here Castiel was at six in the afternoon with all his things unpacked and the house sparkling clean from top to bottom and the salt lines redrawn on the window sills and the wards polished to a shine, and there was no one here to see it.

Castiel sat on his sofa and wondered what to do. He sat still for a few minutes, and then went upstairs and found some spare bedding, brought down a large blue sheet and tucked it over the sofa cushions. It worked well enough as a kind of blanket, and it hid the stains.

He sat for a few more minutes, and then got up and fetched his phone and googled, _revenant._ The pictures he saw were discomfiting and unhelpful. The information he read was about the same. He put the phone down and went back to the sofa.

Maybe Dean wasn’t coming back. Maybe that was rule four: no trusting strange men who walked into your house and saved your life.

It was a very mixed-message thing to do in the first place, Castiel thought. To break into Castiel’s house, and then rescue him. It started off threatening and ended up – well, the opposite. He could still feel the heat of Dean’s chest pressed against his own, the feel of Dean’s breath on his face when he spoke in the dark. He could feel Dean’s hand in his own pulling him through the danger. He could hear Dean’s voice saying,

_Mine._

It didn’t quite feel good, that. But it didn’t feel bad either. It just felt a lot.

Castiel looked around his living room. He should take a picture of it, to send to Gabriel. The WiFi out here was bad enough that it would probably take a few hours to send, and he was only barely exaggerating to think that – but still. He wanted to do what he’d set out to do today: show Gabriel he was wrong.

He got up from the sofa and picked up his phone, flickering to the camera app. There was nothing he could do about the size of the television or the lack of pictures on the bare walls or the general sense of shabbiness that years of neglect had worn in, but still – he looked at the place through the camera, and felt a little silver shine of pride lining the edge of his mood.

_Knock knock._

Half-leaping out of his skin, Castiel put a hand against the wall nearest himself for steadiness for a second. He breathed. He _could_ still breathe. It wasn’t the revenant. He was fine.

_Knock knock?_

Something about the second tap on the door made it more of a question. Castiel hurried down the hall, and clicked open the door.

On the front porch, wearing just what Castiel would expect him to be wearing on a warmish afternoon in the forest, was Dean. He was holding a bag and facing away from the house, looking out into the forest, but when Castiel opened the door he turned around with his eyebrows raised and a slight smile rising to his lips. The warm sun was back and it was larger in Castiel’s chest.

“Huh,” Dean said, clearly trying to hide the smile. “Thought you would be gone by now.”

Castiel held out one hand awkwardly to the side, a half-hearted _ta-da._

“I’m not,” he said.

“Couldn’t bear the thought of leaving without saying goodbye?” Dean said.

“I’m not leaving,” Castiel replied, as Dean walked a little cautiously up to the house’s door and then stepped past Castiel to go inside.

“Sure you’re not,” Dean said easily. “So, what’s cookin’? Oh, wait, I already know.” Dean hefted the bag in his hand. “That would be burgers for two.”

“You brought food?” Castiel said, his mouth already starting to water. He hadn’t noticed himself getting hungry again after his early lunch, but the idea of a burger was making him suddenly weak at the knees. He’d thought he was going to have to make Dean more pasta as he was working with fairly limited resources, but a good burger…

“Only polite,” Dean said. “Come on, then, let’s go through.”

It was strange, the energy between them. On one hand Dean was friendly and familiar with him, and it felt natural after they’d spent the night escaping the clutches of a supernatural nightmare together; on the other hand, Castiel was also aware that they were just two people who didn’t really know each other, trying to get along. He hadn’t met someone new who he was trying to talk to, outside of work or a bar, since… since before he could really remember. It felt strangely formless, the two of them standing in Castiel’s kitchen while Dean unpacked the burgers and asked where the frying pan was. Two bodies in a kitchen who could each say or do anything to the other. No pounding music or business meeting to shape their conversation.

They could talk. They could fight. They could each walk out and never speak to the other again.

Castiel looked at Dean as he muttered something to himself while chopping onion, and thought,

_We could kiss._

He pretended, even within the confines of his own mind, to be shocked at himself. _Kiss? Where did that come from?_ he asked himself, as his mind readily supplied pictures with surround-sound and texture of Dean close to him in the closet, pressed so near that touching their lips would almost have been easier than not.

Castiel licked his lips, and tried to look casual as he leaned back against the kitchen counter.

Dean said,

“Okay, so… anyway. Your name’s Cas, I got that. Where you from?”

“New York,” Castiel said automatically, and then, “well. Not always. But I worked in New York.”

“And then moved here,” Dean said. He drizzled oil into the pan and set it over the heat on the stove. On the countertop where he’d been working was a mise en place that looked like something a professional chef would have been proud of.

“Yes,” Castiel said. There was a pause.

“Chatty,” Dean said. “Aren’t you.”

“Oh…” Castiel swallowed. He hadn’t realised Dean was hoping for more information. “Well. I had to move here. Things… I couldn’t stay in the city. I was looking for new places, and everywhere was horrible. Mould, rats…”

“So you thought,” Dean said, setting one of the burgers into the hot oil where it sizzled satisfyingly, “let me just move up to Maine, to a house in the middle of the Samarbeid.”

“The pictures of the house made it look very…”

“Very not filled with supernatural creatures?” Dean said, and then flashed Castiel a quick grin. “No mould, no rats. Just revenants.”

“That sounds like something to put on a t-shirt,” Castiel said. There was a slight pause, and then he added, “Actually, about… that. The… revenant? I wanted to ask. How…”

He broke off, even as Dean looked up at him expectantly. What was he supposed to ask? He’d had questions pushing at his mind all day, and now that he had the chance to have them answered, he didn’t know where to start.

“Was it real?” he tried. He knew the answer.

“Yeah,” Dean said.

“How?”

Dean frowned at him.

“It just was. How’s anything real, man, I don’t know.”

“But I… no one ever… I mean, it’s just in stories that you hear about things like that. It’s like something from a book. But it was just there, in the house. Real skin and bone, and…”

“Shadows and super creepiness,” Dean finished. “Yeah. Look. What happens in this forest stays here. Only gets out as whispers. Not many people come here anyway, there’s a vibe to the place. Only the most ass-headed stubborn people tend to get through and be able to stay.”

Castiel took a second to think about this.

“You’re calling me ass-headed,” he said.

Dean was reaching for the chopped onions, but he had time to flash another quick, charming smile. This time, it came with a wink.

“Maybe I am,” he said.

“But – even still. If it’s real, I mean… cameras, phones… surely someone would have… how old do you think it is? How old is the forest?” Castiel reached for the right questions. Nothing he was saying seemed to be getting him anywhere.

“Exactly? I don’t know. A while old. Or maybe less. It’s hard to tell. Time gets a little weird in here.”

“You actually live in the forest too? Alone?”

Dean was eating some cheese, sliced off a big block that he’d brought with him.

“Family,” he said, through his mouthful.

“Oh.” Castiel paused, and then said, “But how did it not get you when you went into the forest? You said it’s still out there?”

“It is.” Dean swallowed. “But I know how to handle myself.”

“Could I learn?”

“Uh...” Dean looked him up and down. “It’s different for me.”

“Oh,” Castiel said again. Against Dean’s clear desire for the conversation to move on, he said, “Why?”

“Just is.”

For a while, there was only the hiss of cooking. Then Dean said,

“Look, man. I don’t know. I get it, there are ten thousand questions. I don’t know what to tell you ‘cept it is what it is. You either get used to it or you leave. And everyone leaves, so.”

“Not you,” Castiel pointed out.

“It’s different.”

“Not me,” Castiel said. Dean smiled humourlessly down at the frying pan, stirring the onions with a wooden spoon. The kitchen was starting to fill up with the smell of cooking.

“Not yet,” Dean said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s how it goes.” Dean didn’t meet Castiel’s eyes as he spoke. “Someone arrives ‘cause they have nowhere else to go. Then they leave. Soon as they have anywhere else they can go with some dignity. Never fails.”

Castiel opened his mouth to contradict him, and then closed it. If someone called him right now saying that he could have his old job back, or offered him a new job, or if Gabriel called him to grovel and ask him to come back to the city – would he go? Yes, Castiel thought. Yes. He’d go. He’d leave this terrifying place and this strange man and go home.

“I’m sorry,” he said instead.

“Don’t be,” Dean said bracingly. “Got all I need here anyway.” He picked up a bread bun and sliced it neatly in two. “Toasted bun?” he said.

“Yes, please.”

Dean’s cooking was delicious. They sat together at the kitchen table and ate, mostly in silence, occasionally making eye contact and appreciative noises.

“How long have you lived here?” Castiel tried. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted from Dean – whether it was information, or a connection, or something else – but he knew there was something he wanted, and it felt good to ask questions.

“Mmph.” Dean swallowed. “A while.”

“Did you know the people who lived here before me?”

“The Harvelles? Sure.” Dean wiped his mouth. “They were nice.”

“Did they put the wards up?”

Dean’s face closed.

“No,” he said. “That was a long time ago. They weren’t always up. This place used to be full of creatures… gremlin in the oven to keep it hot, fairies in the living room basking on the window sills. Even the shadows were alright. Then she… it…” Dean went quiet.

“The revenant?” Castiel asked.

“She’s too dark,” Dean said. “She hurts people. So they always leave.”

“So why don’t you just… stop her?”

“It – it’s complicated,” Dean said. He waved a hand. “Boring stuff.”

Castiel dropped the topic, letting Dean’s handwave brush it away. He didn’t want to push too hard. He’d learned it didn’t really seem to work with Dean.

So, the revenant hadn’t always been in the forest – and before it had come, this house hadn’t needed all the ugly wards and salt lines. There had been… Castiel struggled to think it for a second, but got past it. There had been gremlins and fairies living here, in the house. But the dark thing that had come, it had caused too much pain. So the house had needed to be warded, shut away.

Dean chewed his final mouthful of burger, while Castiel swallowed his own.

“That was delicious,” he said.

“Hell yeah.”

“Where did you learn to cook?”

“Ah, you pick things up.” Dean smiled at him, and Castiel smiled back. They were cagey with each other, tentative. But underlining it were these moments, these drawn-out seconds where they caught each other’s eyes and didn’t quite manage to look away.

“Would you like to see the rest of the house?” Castiel asked politely.

“Uh. Sure,” Dean said, and Castiel cleared their plates into the kitchen sink before leading Dean out through the hallway and into the living room.

As soon as he walked in, Dean said,

“Whoa, hey – it’s clean in here.”

Castiel’s full day of cleaning, the mess he’d made of his white t-shirt, the sweat that had dripped down his forehead as he’d scrubbed the trickier patches of dirt, the way his back was aching now – all of it was very suddenly and very definitely worth it.

“Are these yours?” Dean asked. He was standing over by the bookcase, head tilted sideways to read the spines of the books that Castiel had brought with him.

“Yes,” Castiel said. “A good thing I brought them. It’s not as though I could watch much television here.” He gestured towards the clunky square of television squatting on its table opposite the sofa. Dean looked over at it.

“It works okay,” he said. “Or it did.”

“I had a flatscreen,” Castiel said, more than a little wistfully. “Back in New York.”

“Uh-huh.” Dean turned back to the books. “Why are half of these books with wizards in, and half of them books about law?”

Castiel took too long to answer; Dean had turned to look at him by the time he said,

“I don’t know.”

With a little shrug, Dean said,

“I prefer your music to your books. Hey, you wanna know what else I brought with me?” He walked back through to the kitchen, with Castiel trailing after him. He rummaged in his bag again, and this time he turned around with a bottle of amber liquid in his hand. “Got any glasses?” he asked.

“Should we?” Castiel said.

“What? Drink it?” Dean asked. “Well, I mean. You could try showering with it but I think you wouldn’t like it.”

“No,” Castiel said, but he found himself smiling, which he tried to push away. This was serious. “Should we drink it, even though the revenant is still out there? Shouldn’t we try to stay… sharp?”

“I wasn’t plannin’ on a party,” Dean said, sounding amused. “But if you don’t wanna, you don’t have to.”

Castiel considered. On the one hand, having any of his senses impaired felt like a mistake with a dangerous supernatural creature around. On the other hand, Dean was someone Castiel would quite like to make a mistake with.

“Just one,” Dean said, as Castiel went to get glasses.

“Alright,” Castiel said.

––

“And y’know was – was – what’s the best part? _”_ Dean said.

“Mm. No?”

“The filling. I like cherry. I like pecan. I like apple. I like blackberry. I like all of them.” Dean tapped each of his fingers in turn as he made his solemn list. “There ain’t one I don’t like.”

“Must be one,” Castiel said.

“Nah.”

“What if I baked a pie with something bad in the filling?”

“S’not possible.”

“I could,” Castiel said. “Like…” He considered, for just slightly too long.

“See!” Dean said triumphantly. “You can’t even think of something.”

Castiel snorted. They were sitting out on the front porch of the house, each on a low-slung wicker chair that Castiel had found out the back, with the hanging ward of garlic and silver and mirrors swinging above them. And they were more than one glass each deep into the whisky, but not so many that Castiel wasn’t able to think clearly. Not so many that he couldn’t enjoy the cool of the night on his skin, or know that he’d remember every second that they spent talking out here.

“What?” Dean said. The bottom had dropped out of his tone somehow, become more intimate.

“I like this,” Castiel said.

Dean nodded down at the ground, looking pleased.

“S’alright. It’s not bad.” He glanced up at Castiel, and they smiled at each other.

The forest seemed calm tonight – no beasts sang or screamed to them as they sat in the fading orange-gold light.

“Hey,” Dean said.

“Yes, Dean?”

“Why’re you really here? _Really.”_

Castiel considered him for a long moment. Dean was relaxed and calm in the moonlight’s bath, his green eyes slightly narrowed in a smile that his lips barely showed. He looked warm and familiar and Castiel thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to tell him about it, just a bit.

“I got fired,” he said. And then took a sip of his whisky. The burn was good, all the way down his throat.

“Ouch.”

“Yes. I was a lawyer. I had an office, and a company car, I had… I had these cases I worked on. I liked working on them. But then I… something happened. And I got fired.”

“What happened?”

Castiel said nothing. He meant to answer, but when he opened his mouth, no words came out.

“It’s alright,” Dean said.

“I haven’t talked about it to anyone yet. Not even my brother.”

“You have a brother too?” Dean said. “In the city?”

“Yes. Gabriel. He’s a lawyer, too. You have a brother?”

“Yeah, Sam. Younger.”

“Where does he live?”

“He’s around,” Dean said vaguely. “Do you miss it? The city, and your job?”

Just thinking about that was worth another sip of whisky. Castiel frowned down into his glass as he swallowed.

“I do,” he said. “It was good. I felt like I was making a difference. Doing something to help people. And I had a good life there, too. I was comfortable. But…”

Dean’s ears seemed to prick up.

“But?” he said, almost hopefully.

“I don’t know,” Castiel said, his tone quiet. “I don’t know. I thought I was happy there. But maybe I wasn’t happy, maybe I was just… busy. Maybe everything was just too loud for me to be able to tell what I was. Earlier, I was…” Castiel took another sip. “I was cleaning, and I had this feeling. In me.” He tapped his chest, looking across at Dean, who was watching him intently. “I was happy. I _felt_ it. I hadn’t… not in years.”

“Damn,” Dean said. “City’s really as bad as all that, huh.”

“Maybe,” Castiel said. “For me.”

“Would be for me too,” Dean offered.

“Mm.”

They sat quietly for a few seconds, and then a few more. Castiel felt something rising up in him, and he could have headed it off, but he decided to let himself say it.

“You know what was the worst part of my life there?” he said. Dean looked as though he was fighting back a little smile as he rearranged himself on his chair, to face Castiel a little more.

“What,” he said.

“I told my brother all about my girlfriend,” Castiel said. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Dean shift, but he kept going. “I told him her name was Sarah. I told him she had a master’s degree. I told him she was a doctor. You know what I didn’t tell him?”

“What’s that?” Dean said, and his tone was different this time.

“I didn’t tell him that she wasn’t even _real._ ”

_“What?”_ Now Dean was leaning forward again, an expression of surprise mingled with that edge of slight glee on his face.

“I made her up,” Castiel said simply.

“You made up a girlfriend? Why?”

“Because. About a year ago. We were going through something.” Castiel waved a hand. “Our mother passed away. My brother kept saying, oh, you need to just get yourself a girlfriend, you just need to get yourself a girlfriend and it’ll all be better, just go on this date, go on one more date, I have a friend…” Castiel rubbed his fingers against his forehead. “I just told him that I had a girlfriend one day.”

Dean let out a low whistle. His expression wasn’t judgemental when he said,

“Damn.”

“I shouldn’t have told him that,” Castiel said. His voice seemed to disappear for a second, and then he pushed through it. “I should’ve told him that I’m – that I – that I’m gay.”

This time, Dean didn’t move a muscle. His eyes on Castiel’s were suddenly very solemn.

“You are?” he said.

“Yes. Gay and demisexual. Which means I only feel attracted to someone sexually when there’s a deep enough emotional bond between me and them.” He looked down at his whisky. “I never told anyone this before. Not the demisexual part. It’s awkward. To talk about.”

Dean said,

“Well. I don’t think it’s awkward.” He paused and then added, “I’m bisexual, so.”

Castiel lifted up his head. He met Dean’s eyes. Something unspoken passed between them, some acknowledgement that the moments of eye contact and occasional touches had been equally felt, had meant the same thing.

That warm sun was back in Castiel’s chest.

“You make me happy,” he said. He frowned. He hadn’t quite meant to say it that way – had meant to say something more along the lines of how it made him happy to be with Dean, with someone who’d just taken him coming out and not made a big deal out of it but not made nothing of it either.

Dean grinned.

“You too,” he said.

For a long, long while they sat in silence. Castiel finished his glass of whisky in a few more swallows. There was a sensation of see-sawing, of maybe. Possibly. Could be.

And then Dean said,

“The revenant.”

Castiel leaned back in his chair.

“What about it?”

“She’s part of the forest now.” He licked his lips. “She’s not going anywhere.”

“How do you know?”

Dean was folding his hands together and then twisting them back apart, and then refolding them. Castiel could see his hesitation. He wondered what it was that had made Dean want to go back to the subject. Maybe it was as simple as Castiel having opened up and told Dean something, and Dean returning the favour.

“You were asking before,” Dean said. “I think you should know. How it all works. See, she’s a revenant, yeah. So, she used to be a person. But then she passed on. But she didn’t. And she lives here now. She doesn’t kill me when I go out into the forest. Think it’s ‘cause she’s used to me.”

“So it… she… she’s not mindless? Not just… all evil? She could be reasoned with?” Castiel thought for a second. “She was a _person?_ Alive?”

“Once,” Dean said.

The night hummed around them. Leaves skittered across the little clear drive, and the road that led up to it.

“Could we help her?” Castiel said. Dean turned to look him.

“What?”

“Help her,” Castiel repeated.

“She’s undead,” Dean said incredulously.

Castiel thought for a moment.

“You said she chooses not to hurt you. That means there’s something in her able to make decisions. She’s not just a zombie, she’s… there’s something still in there.”

“All I know is, we’ve fought each other until we both know neither of us can win,” Dean said.

“So maybe you need to _not_ fight.”

“You saw her,” Dean said. “She’d try to kill us. She’d actually kill you.”

“Or maybe she’d choose not to,” Castiel said. “Maybe she wants something. Maybe if we can get her what she wants… like ghosts, they have unfinished business. Maybe we need to help her finish something here, so that she can move on.”

“You believe in that stuff?” Dean said. Castiel stared at him.

“I don’t know,” he said blankly. He realised suddenly that he’d been talking about going into the forest to try to solve the problems of a long-dead dark supernatural creature. He believed in that, now, he supposed. Or – did it count as believing if he knew it was real? Maybe not.

“Well. Your belief is pretty powerful stuff, so.”

He looked across at Dean, who was swirling the remainder of his whisky, his expression hard to read as he looked down at his own legs, tapped a finger against one of them. He looked thoughtful, but also angry – or maybe confused.

“What’s wrong,” Castiel said.

For a long time, he thought Dean wouldn’t answer, but he had nothing else to say so he stayed quiet – and then Dean broke into speech, suddenly, as though he’d taken a mental run-up.

“Before she came,” Dean said, “I thought I knew what happened. After. After you die.”

Castiel nodded.

“I thought you went to the Otherworld, and you were born there. It’s why in my family we always celebrated a death. Because you were being born somewhere else. And you mourn a baby’s birth. Because somewhere in the Otherworld, that person just passed on. It made sense. It made _sense._ It meant no one was ever really lost. And my mother – when she – it helped, you know? To think about that. And my brother lost someone – it helped then too.”

“That makes sense,” Castiel said quietly.

“Right. But then _she_ came, and…” Dean threw back the last of his whisky, quickly, harshly.

“You hate her,” Castiel said.

“She chased away everyone. All the goodness. And the fact she even exists means nothing I believed in was real. She’s nothing but hate. She’s – she steals every good thing. There’s nothing to do but hate her. You _saw_ her.”

“She chooses not to kill you,” Castiel said.

“Because she can’t.”

“You’re sure?”

Dean went silent.

“I don’t know,” Castiel said. His head suddenly felt very heavy, and he wanted to go upstairs and lie down. “Maybe I don’t know anything.”

Seeming to sense his mood, Dean stretched, and then stood up. Castiel watched him fold his arms, and look out into the forest.

“Maybe you do,” he said, so quietly that Castiel almost missed it.

When Castiel stood up too, Dean turned towards him. There was a look in his eyes – a closeness, an intimacy. Over the course of the hours that they’d spent together that evening, and the night before, something had fallen into place. The hurt in Dean’s face, and the way Castiel’s eyes kept flicking involuntarily to look at the forest, it didn’t distance them in the way it might have done before dinner and talking out here on the porch. Now, Castiel could look at Dean and see the pain and the tension and understand it, just a little. And Dean could look at Castiel and see the fear and the confusion and understand it. Again, not completely. Just a little.

Castiel felt the nearness between them like a throb through that quiet, still space inside his chest. The one that the silence here in the forest kept touching.

He took a step towards Dean, who turned his body to face Castiel.

“Cas,” Dean said, half-bitten-back.

Castiel reached out a hand, and after a moment Dean slid his fingers against Castiel’s palm – not holding his hand, just letting them both experience touch. Castiel could feel his heart pounding in his chest. He breathed out, and let his eyes dip to Dean’s lips.

It didn’t make sense. He was scared and he’d met Dean so little time ago and he couldn’t imagine that anything starting between them could possibly go anywhere – it wasn’t as though he planned to live in the forest forever, it wasn’t as though they could start anything long-term – but even though it didn’t make sense, Castiel wanted Dean’s lips. Complicatedly, emotionally, he wanted them.

Dean bent in closer. His head tilted.

Castiel lifted his chin. He looked into Dean’s eyes, half-lidded. They breathed, and Castiel could feel Dean’s breath on his face –

And then, quite suddenly, Dean dropped his head. He pulled away. Castiel, closing his slightly-parted lips and swallowing hard, saw that humourless smile was back on his face.

“Nah,” Dean said. “Nah. You with your flatscreen and your law books. Nah, you – you won’t be stayin’.” He started to back away.

“Wait,” Castiel said.

Dean turned away.

“But –”

“I’ll be back,” Dean said, throwing it over his shoulder, careless. He walked down off the porch, and began to head out into the forest.

“When?” Castiel said, a little too loudly.

No one answered.

It was thirty minutes before Castiel went inside.


	6. Chapter 6

Castiel woke up with a headache so gentle that it was almost pleasant. The nibbling twinge of it and the slight tackiness in his mouth filled up his mind. It was easier to think about the discomfort than it was to think about what had happened the night before. The long evening, the almost-kiss.

It had been good, though. Dean smiling down at the ground. Dean catching his eye and holding his stare. Dean’s standoffish quietness slowly easing into speech as the night had worn on, and the distance in his eyes flickering now and then to show something else. Something close, that wanted to be closer.

The sunlight through the windows of Castiel’s bedroom was a little kinder today. Still grey and limpid, but with a sweet pastel pink twist. For a few minutes, and then a few minutes more, Castiel lay back on his pillows and just let himself be.

He lifted up one hand and twisted it in a vague pattern, watching the light of the morning catch on his skin.

Back in the city, he wouldn’t have been able to lie like this. The chatter in his head would have had him reaching for his phone, for a book, for the TV remote, for something – anything – to fill the silence.

Here, the silence was different. He didn’t mind it. Without the rattle of trains and the jabber of humanity and the pounding of their footsteps, with only the rustle of the leaves and nothing else, with nowhere he was supposed to be and nothing he was supposed to do, the silence didn’t hurt to hear.

After some time, when he was ready, Castiel got out of bed. He began to make himself breakfast. The world felt just a little smaller and kinder and more careful all around him in the way that it could do, sometimes, in the light of a morning after a long night. While he gulped orange juice and waited for his bacon to sizzle into crispness, he kept looking back again on the evening before.

So. Now he was the kind of person who sat on his porch with whisky in his hand. Now he was a Castiel who tried to kiss an almost-stranger and got rejected by him.

Had he always been this person, just he hadn’t had the opportunity to prove it until now? Or had Castiel created this him, this iteration of himself who was leaning against the kitchen counter and waiting for bacon grease to ease his slight hangover – had he been born the night before, suddenly, in the moment Castiel had held out his hand for Dean to take?

Had he become someone new, or did he just know himself better now?

Castiel served up his bacon and decided to leave thinking too hard for later.

He ate, and then washed up after his breakfast and dinner from the night before. He opened up his fridge and surveyed the contents; still plenty of food to see him through the next couple of days, if he didn’t mind his meals getting a touch repetitive.

When he heard the tap on the front door, he realised that some part of him had been waiting for it, hoping for it. Like a fist that had been clenched expectantly inside him, that he only knew had been taut when he felt its release.

He ran a hand through his hair and looked down at what he was wearing as he walked through to the door. The pyjamas he’d brought with him to the forest were too nice for Dean’s taste, he thought. Dean would roll his eyes at the way that they matched. Castiel himself looked at them for the first time with a slight wrinkle in his nose. He’d thought they looked smart when he’d bought them.

If he was honest, he’d been thinking about Sarah when he’d bought them. One thing he hadn’t expected when he’d made up a fake girlfriend was how the fiction would start to change him. Like a story he was telling that had ended up telling him, just a little. Sarah had liked Versace and matching pyjamas.

Castiel opened the door, and sure enough, Dean went to speak and then stopped, and slowly took in what Castiel was wearing. His gaze travelled up and down, and then he looked into Castiel’s eyes.

With one eyebrow cocked, Castiel awaited his judgement.

“Hey,” Dean said, apparently opting for a non-confrontational greeting over sartorial critique.

“Hello, Dean.”

“Did you mean what you said about unfinished business?”

Castiel looked at Dean, his eyes squinting.

“The revenant?” he said.

“No,” Dean replied dryly, “the _other_ undead thing living in the forest that might have business left unfinished. Yeah, man, the revenant.” He was speaking quickly, easily, as though continuing a conversation that they’d been having for hours. Maybe it was his way of pushing past the possible awkwardness, Castiel thought, and decided to let him have it.

“It could be that,” Castiel said, crossing his arms over his chest. “That’s all I said.”

“Right. Well. Wanna find out?”

Castiel stared at him, now. Dean’s innocent expression tipped over into a slight grin. There was a kind of restlessness to him this morning.

“Could be fun,” he said.

“You want to go and find the revenant,” Castiel said. “And ask it what its unfinished business is. And you want me to come?”

“Hell yeah.”

“Shouldn’t you go alone? You said she doesn’t hurt you, and she… pretty clearly wanted to hurt me, last time I met her.” Castiel shuddered at the thought of her, those grub-pale hands reaching out for him.

“She’ll know that you’re with me,” Dean said. “I’ll make sure you’re fine.”

He said it off-handedly, but Castiel had seen the proof of it; he knew Dean would protect him, to the point of leaving Castiel in the safe and protected closet space under the spiders, and going to find the wards alone that would defend the house against the revenant. It was an odd sensation to be able to know for certain that he could trust Dean with his life, Castiel thought. To be able to look at him, standing there in the morning light with the sun spattered across his brown-blond hair and freckled skin, and feel it: the bond that it had forged, of trust. Something that he’d always looked for in his friendships, back in the city – he’d always wanted to know how far the people around him would go for him. And it was something that he had, now. With Dean.

Dean, the man he’d known for less than two days.

And Dean didn’t feel that bond with him, Castiel knew. That had been proven when Dean had shrugged away Castiel’s touch at the end of the night.

But he’d come here to ask for Castiel’s help.

“You think a lot,” Dean said. “Should I come back in like two hours when you’re done? Or is staring at me a key part of the whole thing?”

Castiel felt a slight smile easing onto his face.

“I’ll come,” he said. Dean made the face that Castiel recognised from the night before, the one that meant he was pleased.

“Okay. Great. We can…”

“Dean?”

“Yeah?”

Castiel swallowed.

“This is strange, isn’t it?”

“Going to find a revenant? I mean. Strange really depends on what your normal is.”

“No, I mean… us…” He intended to finish the sentence, but couldn’t find a way to do so.

Dean looked at him closely.

“You want me to leave?” he said.

“No,” Castiel said without hesitation. “No, I don’t. I think that’s what’s strange.”

“Wow. Wanting to be around me is strange, huh. What a compliment.”

“I didn’t mean…” Castiel broke off when he saw the glint of humour in Dean’s eyes. “You know what I mean.”

“I guess so.” Dean shrugged. “Look. You had a good idea about how to get rid of this thing that’s been screwing up me and my brother’s life for years. So I asked you to come help with it. It’s nothin’ more than that. Nothing strange about helping out a neighbour, is there?”

Nothing strange about saving your neighbour’s life, thought Castiel. Nothing strange about almost kissing your neighbour on the porch in the very early morning.

“Nothing strange at all,” Castiel said. “Let me go get dressed.”

––

For the first time since he’d arrived, Castiel left the clearing between the trees where the house crouched.

Dean walked slightly ahead of him, and Castiel matched the even pace of his footsteps. He looked calm, but when Castiel glanced down at Dean’s hands, he saw that they were held in loose fists. Dean was ready for something.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Castiel asked him. They were headed into the trees, away from the direction of the sea-breeze that sometimes rattled at Castiel’s window-panes. Dean had walked off into the woods with so much assurance that Castiel hadn’t thought to ask straight away.

“Kinda,” Dean said, which invoked less trust. “There’s a place in the forest where nothing goes. None of us like to be near it. No one talks about why.” They tramped on through the woods for a few moments, the quiet broken only by the sound of their breathing. Then Dean added, “My brother says it’s dark there and that’s all he’ll say about it. Says it’s best left alone. So I’ve done just that up to now. But hey, if we’re gonna go looking for a revenant, seems like the place to start.”

“Will your brother be angry?”

“Yeah,” Dean said.

“Oh. Should we…”

“It’s fine,” Dean said repressively, interrupting him.

Castiel fell silent. The moment hung awkwardly. The politeness with which they’d treated each other so far through the morning, a courteous mutually-agreed-upon illusion, splintered.

“Well,” Castiel said, “I don’t know your brother, but maybe next time you see him, you could tell him from me that I didn’t mean to lead you astray from his wishes.”

“He’ll know that,” Dean said shortly.

“Good,” Castiel replied, and it wasn’t much of a comeback but his tone made Dean look over at him. Castiel looked back, his eyes sharp.

“Don’t do that,” Dean said.

“What?”

“That face thing.”

Castiel looked down at the forest floor. The fallen leaves there moved over each other so easily, pressed against each other. When they were crushed underfoot, they only pressed closer. Castiel wished people could be like that. When something weighed on them, it would always press them nearer.

“I said, _stop,”_ Dean said.

Castiel came to a halt.

“Not like that,” Dean said, sounding exasperated. Castiel ignored him.

“Do you want to do this?” he said.

Dean stared at him.

“Because if you don’t want to do this,” Castiel said, “then we won’t. That’s fine. I’m only out here because you came and got me.”

Dean eyed him, his mouth half-open, looking unsure.

“If you’re going to upset your brother or if it’s upsetting for you yourself to do this, let’s not,” Castiel carried on, when Dean didn’t reply. “It’s probably a terrible idea. I don’t know anything about this place. I only said anything at all about it last night because I’ve read a few fantasy novels and I was reminded of them for a moment. Just one moment. It was throwaway. It didn’t mean anything.”

“It’s fine,” Dean said, and then didn’t say more.

Castiel lifted out his hands to the sides for a second, and then let them fall. He met Dean’s eyes.

“You can go back if you want,” Dean said.

“I don’t know. I want to help,” Castiel said. “But I don’t know what helping looks like here.” He waited a few seconds, and then said, “You seem… tense, and I don’t know if that’s my fault. I don’t want to –”

“It’s not you,” Dean said, waving him away.

“Then –”

“It’s her.”

Dean swallowed obviously, his jaw muscles tight enough that Castiel could watch them move. The expression on his face was serious, the most serious that Castiel thought he’d ever seen it. There was none of the edge of glee that Castiel had seen in his eyes, in his smile, even when the revenant had been chasing them inside the house. He looked suddenly hollowed out.

“She’s been here long enough,” Dean said.

“Dean…”

“Had all night to think about it,” he said roughly. “Need to do it. Try this. Before you leave the forest.”

“I might not leave,” Castiel said quietly.

“You will.”

“I might not…”

“You will. So it has to be before then.” Dean set his jaw, and then turned away. He began striding off into the forest again.

“Why before I leave?” Castiel said, following him.

“Because,” Dean said.

“Because?”

“Because. It has to be you. You’ve got… it just has to be you. And I guess because it’s dangerous.” Dean’s voice got even gruffer. “I’d be okay with making sure you get out. Even if I don’t. Don’t know I’ll feel that about anyone else who’d care to try this.”

It was so blunt that Castiel didn’t know how to answer. He’d have thought it was a lie, Dean just exaggerating in the way that people had always done in the city, pretending to have each other’s back until the end of time and then abandoning them over miscommunications and missed dinner dates. But the thing was, Castiel had proof. Dean had left the spidery closet to go and fetch the wards. And yes, he’d known that there was a good chance the revenant wouldn’t hurt him, as she hadn’t before. But there had been a chance that she would hurt him. And Dean had gone out there anyway, and hadn’t just fled; he’d fetched the wards. He’d put them back up. He’d saved Castiel’s life.

In fact, he’d seen that the wards were down in the first place, and he’d come in to help whoever was inside, before he’d even met Castiel.

“I think you’d make sure someone else got out,” Castiel said. “Not just me.”

“Didn’t say I wouldn’t,” Dean said. “Just said I’m okay with it this time.”

“Why?”

Dean shrugged.

Castiel didn’t know what to say. Would he do the same? Be okay with dying for Dean? Today, in this forest? He didn’t know. He barely knew Dean. And, he realised as he looked inside, he barely knew himself. In New York there hadn’t been any reason to know whether he’d throw himself into the path of a revenant to save another person’s life. Here, it was all that seemed to matter.

Maybe in the city it had mattered. He just hadn’t known.

“We’re coming up on it,” Dean said. “We’re close.” Castiel looked about them. The woods seemed much the same; there was no sudden horror or sense of dread. All that was different was the taste of the air – away from the house, the slight salt-tang of the water was gone.

“You’re sure?” he said. “It’s still so light.”

“She makes her own dark,” Dean said shortly. “Stay close to me.”

With a few longer strides, Castiel caught up to Dean and walked nearer to him. He could hear Dean’s breathing, see the way his jaw was still held taut. If he could have done anything right now, Castiel thought, and been anywhere, he’d have run his hand down Dean’s jaw and watched it loosen. Watched his eyes go wide. Felt the softness of Dean’s skin under his fingertips, coarsened here and there by stubble. He’d have said Dean’s name. And Dean would have said –

“Cas.”

Castiel cleared his throat.

“Yes?”

“We’re here.”

He’d been watching Dean so intently that Castiel realised he hadn’t been paying attention to where they’d been walking. Now that he looked up, he saw that they’d come to a place in the trees – a place unlike the steady green-gold of the forest they’d been passing through before.

It was a clearing. Perfectly round, as though the trees had lovingly crept right up to the edge, and then stopped with their boughs reaching out. The ground had no leaves on it. The bare earth was a brown scar across the forest floor, a circular burn. And at the very centre of the clearing, there was a single tree.

It was dead.

Castiel looked up at its pale white boughs, and felt his heart ache. He couldn’t have said why. Only perhaps that the tree, with its stiff twigs pointed skyward, circled all around by the living green that couldn’t touch it, was very beautiful.

“What do we do now?” Castiel said.

“I don’t know.” Dean was watching the tree, his expression hard to read. Castiel wanted to reach out and take his hand, like on the night the revenant had come to his house.

Instead, Castiel looked down at the ground. He was just a few steps away from where the leafy carpet ended, and became flat undisturbed earth.

“Is she in the tree?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Cas.” Dean was looking around the clearing, seeming nervous. “Maybe she’ll come out and talk to us if we wait.”

They stood in silence for one breath, two breaths, three. Castiel watched the tree. It didn’t move, not even when a breeze ruffled the soft living leaves on the trees right above them. So still that it was as though it didn’t feel the wind.

Castiel watched and watched. Saw the green trees reaching, reaching.

He took a step forward.

“What’re you doing?” Dean hissed.

He stepped forward again. This time, Dean stepped with him, staying one pace behind.

“Cas. Don’t –”

Castiel walked forward, into the clearing.

As soon as his foot touched the bare earth, everything went quiet, and slow.

He looked around.

The breeze was still moving the trees, but Castiel couldn’t hear it, he couldn’t feel it. When he turned to see Dean, Dean’s mouth was moving, but Castiel couldn’t hear the words he was saying, and it was as though his lips were moving in slow-motion.

“Dean,” Castiel said, and his own voice made no sound.

He turned to face the tree.

He knew he should go back. Leave the clearing. Tell Dean what happened when he stepped inside, ask him what it meant. But the tree was so close, just ten steps or less, and Castiel knew he wouldn’t want to come back into the clearing again once he’d left it.

When he turned back to Dean, he could see that Dean’s mouth was open, and his teeth were a little bared, as though he were calling out. As Castiel watched, his lips moved. _Cas,_ Castiel understood. Dean was calling the name he’d given him.

“It’s alright,” he said silently, hoping Dean could read his lips. “It’s fine. I’m just going to the tree.”

Dean started to say something else but Castiel didn’t wait to read his lips. He levelled his eyes at the tree, and started to walk.

It took forever, and it took a moment. And when he was close enough to the tree to touch it, he put out a hand. Now, now he could hear something. Now he heard a breath. A breath of wind? A breath drawn in? Castiel moved his hand closer to the tree’s bark skin. The breath became a gasp. A rattling heave at the air. He knew that sound. He recognised it. In his mind, he saw a dark figure with pale ghoulish hands.

The revenant.

He hesitated.

He should step back. He should leave the clearing. He looked behind him, and saw Dean holding out a hand, calling something, starting forward into the circle himself. All Castiel had to do was wait for a few seconds, and Dean would catch up. Dean would touch the tree instead if Castiel said he should. Dean would feel the consequences of its barken press on his bare palm.

Putting his head on one side, Castiel watched Dean move towards him. Silent. Face pinkening with the suddenness of his effort. He was desperate, Castiel realised. Suddenly desperate not to let Castiel put himself in danger.

Castiel turned, and through the syrup-slow air he slammed his hand against the bark of the dead white tree.

The whining gasp of air became a scream, an immediate scream that tore into Castiel. He fell to his knees, his hand scraping down the bark – and then with a force that hit his stomach in a rippling wave, he was pushed backwards and away.

He felt himself slam into Dean, and the two of them sprawled slowly, heavily, onto the bare soil, tearing up gouges of it with their fingers as they fought to stop tumbling. Dean’s legs tangled with Castiel’s. For the moment of impact, Castiel closed his eyes.

When he opened them, he saw her.

She stood in front of the tree. Encased in shadow, berobed in it like a ruler of the dark, and seeming barely to stand on the ground, she looked at Castiel. Her eyes were two pits, far larger than any human eyes. Her skin was pale as mould. Her mouth was open, gasping.

Dean shifted slowly beside Castiel, jostling him, and when Castiel looked, he saw Dean’s mouth moving. He looked back to the creature, and saw that her gaze was still fixed on him. She came closer. Castiel began to struggle to move backwards, pulling away, trying to disentangle himself from Dean – but there was something about her presence that held him still, rigid as the tree at her back. And she breathed in and Dean, too, had now frozen.

She approached him, her hands reaching for him. And all Castiel could do was wait for her touch.


	7. Chapter 7

“Please,” Castiel said, silently. He wanted to move, wanted to run, but couldn’t. Could barely heave enough air inside his lungs to keep breathing. Her shadows were chasing into him, just as they had done in the house. He fought them back, fought them off. He was going to die here, he thought. He was going to die here in the middle of the forest. Stupidly. Unnecessarily. Would anyone even find him? Would Gabriel drive down here after a week of not hearing from him? Two weeks?

Dean’s body was pressed against Castiel’s right side. The two of them were bound together in stillness. Castiel couldn’t turn to look at him, but he tried not to think of the revenant that was almost on him. If these were going to be his last moments, in the haze of dark and cold he wanted to be thinking of the warmth of Dean against him right then.

The revenant reached Castiel. She reached down. She put her hands on his chest.

The pain lanced through him. An ecstasy of agony. All Castiel could do was take it.

Heartbreak, pure heartbreak – and Castiel had never had his heart broken, never felt an emotion skewer through him like this, but the instant he felt the rending in his chest he knew it for what it was. He screwed up his face and bit his lip to try not to cry out, felt it split under his teeth, felt a line of heat run down his chin. In his mind he was tiny. He was a clinging light. He was nothing but a moment, a wink of existence against the all-consuming dark. He struggled to breathe. He wanted to cry.

**You** , said a voice in his mind.

Castiel opened his eyes. The pain didn’t lessen.

**Why have you come here.**

“Please,” Castiel said, and now he could hear his own voice, at least. Or maybe he wasn’t even speaking aloud – maybe his thoughts were calling back to her, so urgent that they sounded like a voice.

**Why have you come.**

“You’re – killing – me,” Castiel said. “Please – please, let me go –”

**This pain will not kill you.**

Castiel stared at her. Every breath he managed to drag into his lungs was a stab. Every punching beat of his heart was a blow.

**It is not your pain** , she said. **It will not kill you.**

“Who – whose – what –” Castiel couldn’t get the words out.

**It is mine.**

A pause. Castiel stared up at her.

“This – your –”

**I cannot speak to you another way.**

A longer pause still, and then –

**I am sorry it hurts.**

Castiel stopped fighting. He unclenched his hands. He looked up into the twin chasms of her eyes. The cold dark pain didn’t lessen, not even slightly. But when he eased his muscles, he could talk.

“Who – are – you?” he demanded, round the edge of the searing through his mind, through his chest. “What do you want? Why did you come to my house?”

The revenant watched him. Her hands on his chest were firm. She didn’t reach for his throat, didn’t tilt her head hungrily.

**I am who I must be.** Her voice was rasping and strained, even within Castiel’s mind. **I want what I cannot have. I go where I must go.**

“Do you have… unfinished business?” Castiel managed. Relaxing into the pain had made it possible to speak, but he was sweating, he still wanted to cry so much he thought he would shake out of his own skin with it. He wanted to scream.

**Yes.**

Her voice was becoming clearer inside Castiel’s head, as though she were coming closer. The tone of it was too hard to read through the pain and the dark.

“Can I help,” Castiel ground out.

There was the longest pause yet.

It drew out, second after second.

Castiel stared up into her blank, ghastly face.

Then –

**You want to help me?**

“It’s why we came,” Castiel said.

**You and Sam’s brother. Dean.**

“Yes.”

**The one who tries to kill me.**

“Yes.”

The revenant’s rattling breaths had slowed.

**You came to help.**

“Yes,” Castiel said. He closed his eyes and the pain was unbearable and he was lost in a mire of the dark. He opened them again and he saw her, the pale skin and the gaping sadness of her mouth and the grim chasing shadows that nipped at her, and clothed her.

**You cannot** , she said eventually. **Helping with this will change you. As it changed me. You do not want to become like me.**

“You…” Castiel felt sweat dripping down his forehead. A feverish line of wet down a brow made cold by her touch. “You weren’t always… like this?”

**I became what I must be.**

“What were you before?”

**Alive. Then dead. Then this.**

“Wh- what’s your name?” Castiel asked.

The revenant drew in a breath.

**What is yours** , she said.

Castiel stared up at her. He opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it. _Given names can be taken,_ said Dean’s voice in his mind. Castiel could still feel the press of Dean’s body up against him. He didn’t want to take his eyes off the revenant, didn’t think he could have done even if he’d wanted to, but he wished he could look at Dean.

“What made you into this?” Castiel asked. “Or who? Can I stop them? Will that end this…” He closed his eyes when he thought about it. A tear slid down each of his cheeks. “This pain?”

**I was woken by love. It cannot be stopped.**

“Love?”

Castiel had never seen anything that looked less like a creature of love. It was horrendous, nightmarish. It had clawing hands. It hurt, and with just a touch its hurt spread outward.

**The Samarbeid was being killed by this pain. I woke to take it away.**

“The Samarbeid? You’re trying to help the forest?”

**I am helping.**

So this was what helping looked like here, Castiel thought.

“But Dean,” Castiel said. “Dean says you frighten everyone away. You came into my house when the wards were down. You were frightening. That didn’t seem like helping.”

**You cannot stay. No one can stay.**

“No one?”

**No one stays in the forest.**

“Why not?”

**They cannot. Everyone leaves. Better sooner than later.**

“So you chase them away? But why?”

**It hurts less.**

The part of Castiel that remembered being without pain thought of every story he’d ever heard, every cliche he’d ever rolled his eyes at, that showed hurt people pushing other people away. The memories of his eye-rolling felt naive. The pain ringing through Castiel, every grinding nerve and aching part of him, agreed with the revenant.

The pain looked inside him and found where he was weak and said, _don’t look at Dean._ It said, _you already care about him too much._ It said, _he’s going to hurt you and you can’t take any more hurt than this, you’ll die._

**You see** , said the revenant, as though she’d heard.

“I know,” Castiel said. But he thought of Dean sitting on the porch, laughing. “But…”

**You have held this pain for a fraction of a moment. I have held it for years.**

Castiel closed his eyes again. The tears were flowing so hot that he thought they could be blood.

“I want to help,” Castiel said. “I want to help you. I want to make this pain stop for you. How can I do it?”

**There is no stopping this pain.**

“It can’t be like this forever,” Castiel said, and his voice cracked a little just at the thought. The pain didn’t even belong to him and the thought of it never ending was unimaginable.

**There is no stopping it,** the revenant repeated, and this time she seemed agitated, almost frustrated with him.

“But –”

**It is an open wound that will not heal. You cannot end it. You should not have come here.**

“I want to help,” Castiel said, feeling as though he were reaching across an impossible divide.

**You cannot help me. Not by ending the pain.** She went quiet for a moment, and they stared at each other. Blue eyes looking up into the whorled dark.

“Then can I take it from you?”

The words were spoken. And Castiel felt something shift, like a deep bass note played suddenly, ringing through him. The world beneath and all around him seemed to sigh, as though it had known he would offer this, but had hoped for his sake that he might not.

Castiel looked up at the revenant, and things were different. She was, in herself, ever so slightly different. She was completely still. Even her shadows held in in place.

**You’d do that?** she said.

Castiel looked up at her. A creature holding pain, made from love. He didn’t know how to answer.

**You… you cannot take this pain. It would kill you** , she said, but softer. **You are not shaped for it. And you cannot change your shape, as I have, to be able to hold it.**

“Your shape?”

**The world has shapes for creatures like me.** She held out her hands, showing the grotesque paleness of her body, the wreathing of the shadows. **This is a shape I must take. There are things that are believed about me. I am ugly because people think creatures like me are ugly. I can change to fit because I am not alive. And so I can hold the pain.**

“I could –”

**You are alive. You are very alive. Your belief is the strongest I have ever seen… you can change the world around you.** He heard the hesitation in her voice. **But you would have to die, and let the world change you instead, to be able to do this.** She waited for a second and then said again, **You would have to die.**

Castiel swallowed.

“Can you give me… some of it,” Castiel said. “Not all? Could I do that without – without dying?”

A long pause, and then –

**How much.**

“Enough... to make it better? Enough that you might not be so scared of new people. Enough that you might let some new people into the forest.”

**But why? Why would you do this?**

She had pulled away, just a little, in her confusion. Her hand pressing on Castiel’s chest wasn’t so hard.

“To help you,” Castiel said. And now, with the revenant’s hold on his body loosened just a touch, he did turn his head painstakingly slowly and looked at Dean. Dean was sitting and watching him, eyes roaming Castiel’s own face worriedly. When their eyes met, Dean started to talk, but Castiel still couldn’t hear his words. “To help him,” Castiel said to the revenant.

**I don’t know.**

“What don’t you know?”

**What I would be.**

“What you’d… be?”

**Without it.**

“You don’t know what you’d be without the pain?” Castiel broke his eye contact with Dean, and looked back to her.

**I have changed over the years. I am shaped to hold it. Without it I do not know what would fill the space.**

Castiel breathed out.

**It is best I hold onto it. It is who I am.**

She was going to move away. Castiel felt it. She was going to pull her hands away from Castiel’s chest and stand upright and go back into the tree, and nothing was going to change, and Dean was going to keep living in the hurt that Castiel barely understood and Castiel himself was going to be chased out of the forest by the revenant’s shadows and Dean keeping him at arm’s length.

No.

Castiel reached up, grinding his bones and muscles against the weight of the revenant’s will. He lifted an open hand up to the revenant and seized her arm, holding her palm tight to his chest.

“No,” Castiel said.

**I can’t.**

“You can,” Castiel said. “Look, it isn’t all of who you are. It can’t be.”

**I was born from it.**

“This version of you was,” Castiel said, through gritted teeth. “Didn’t you say you were alive before? And dead? You were something else before this happened to you.”

**But I can’t be alive again. I can’t sleep under the earth again.**

“So become something else,” Castiel said.

There was a silence. Behind the revenant, her tree groaned a little, and a shred of breeze sang eerily through the stiff white branches.

**Something else** , she said.

“You could do it,” Castiel said. “You just have to give yourself space.”

**Space.**

“Space,” Castiel said. “Silence.” He didn’t know what else to say. He gripped her arm with one hand. If she tried to move away, he was ready to grip tighter to hold her in place.

**Space** , she said again. **To change again. You think I could do it.**

“I think you could.”

**You believe I could change.**

“Yes,” Castiel said. In his mind, the crushing weight of the dark was shifting, just slightly, like a night being lit for an impossibly slow moment by a crack of lightning.

**I…**

Castiel clenched his teeth together. He stared resolutely up at the revenant.

**You would not be the same after taking this from me.**

She was going to do it. Castiel could hear it in her voice. He’d heard that tone in the courtroom a hundred times – a thousand times, even. He’d heard that hesitance, the wariness.

Castiel looked back at Dean. He was still held in place; Castiel could see the veins in his neck standing out as he tried to break free of the revenant’s hold on him. When Castiel met his eyes, he stopped struggling.

Without words, Castiel nodded.

“That’s alright,” he said.

**Are you… are you sure you…**

“Yes,” Castiel said. The world was spinning around him, his body was a lightning rod for pain, everything nerve in him was screaming to run – but there was a part of him inside that was sure. Sure that right here, in a forest in Maine on the ground in the middle of the morning, he knew what to do. He knew the right thing to do. He knew he was going to do it.

He knew this feeling. He’d been fired for it. And it turned out, he might die for it.

**I must take something to be able to give something. It is the way of things.**

“Take something? My life?”

**No. Not that.**

Castiel kept looking at Dean.

“Then take what? I don’t have anything with me apart from what I’m wearing. And the keys to the house. And my phone.”

**Those are not things I can take.**

“Then what –” Castiel broke off. He heard Dean’s voice in his mind, warning him. _Given names can be taken._ “Oh.” He breathed out, long and slow. “My… my name.”

She didn’t say anything. Her hands were still on his chest, his fingers still wrapped around one of her wrists. Castiel saw the confusion in Dean’s eyes, saw Dean searching his face over and over to try to understand what was happening. Castiel turned back to look at the revenant.

“You need my name,” he said.

**You do not have to give it to me.**

“But you need it,” Castiel said, “if I’m going to help you.”

**I am darkness,** said the revenant. **I am pain. I am hurt. You do not have to trust me with this.**

Castiel looked up into those soulless whorls on her face, the dark places where her eyes should be. He looked at her pale skin and the cruel faces that laughed in her robing of shadows. He remembered her saying, _I am sorry it hurts._

“You aren’t pain,” he said. “You’re in pain. It’s different.”

He took a moment to breathe. To take in where he was and the choice that he was making. The revenant said that the pain couldn’t be stopped. He didn’t know if it would be different for him, because he was still alive and still human. Surely this pain in his chest would work like human pain? And his heart stood a chance of mending? But assuming the worst – assuming that the hurt would never end, and he’d carry it with him either until he died or until he gave it on to someone else – could he do this? To help a creature who’d been trying to frighten him away, and a man he barely knew?

The answer was, Castiel was surprised to find, yes.

Yes. The revenant had been woken from her long dark sleep to take on the pain of the forest. She’d carried it for years, she said. She deserved respite. Someone had to do something. And Castiel was the only someone he was aware of, for miles around.

Except, of course, for Dean.

**He has his own pain,** the revenant said. **Too much.**

“I thought so,” Castiel said.

**He fights me all the time. I cannot tell him I am trying to help. He will not listen.**

“He’s afraid. And angry.”

**You care for him.**

“Yes. I do.”

**It will always hurt to care. If you choose this.**

“Ah,” Castiel said.

He thought of Dean, of the look on his face when he’d pulled away from Castiel’s touch. It hadn’t made sense before. With the pain that seared his nerves now, it made complete sense. The pain said, _don’t touch me please don’t touch me please – touch me but don’t touch me please, please._ And the pain said, _touch me touch me please but don’t touch me._ And it said, _please._

“Well,” Castiel said, “it already hurts for him.”

**Yes.**

“Then I’ll live.” Castiel cleared his throat.

**You are really going to do this?**

“I really am.”

**But you are a stranger here.**

Castiel looked up at her, searching his mind for the words.

“Where I came from,” he said, “I was always looking for a way to be this person.” He looked back towards Dean. “My name,” he said, looking at Dean. “It’s Castiel.”

Castiel’s head snapped back.

The pain that had come to rest inside him suddenly rushed, jolted, skittered through him, thrust new needles into his chest, burned new brands into the underside of his skin. He closed his eyes but he could still see her, see the revenant, see her through the darkness – except in his mind, now, he saw her not as the creature with pitted eyes and ghost-white skin. He saw her with long wavy golden hair and terribly sad eyes.

“Tell Sam I love him,” she said. “Tell Sam that Jess loves him.” And then she fell backwards, and away. The darkness enclosed her, embraced her.

And she was out of Castiel’s mind. He was alone. And in the moment before unconsciousness swallowed him, he felt the sear of a pain that was entirely his own burn into his chest.


	8. Chapter 8

“– swear to fucking god, I’m gonna kill you if you don’t wake up, I’m gonna kill you if you’re dead, I’m gonna fucking kill you, I swear to god – Sam, you’re gonna have to help me move him –”

“Dean?”

“Cas? _Cas?”_

Castiel opened his eyes. He was lying on his back, sprawled across Dean, head cradled in the crook of one of his arms. He blinked upwards.

“You’re alive,” Dean said.

“I am,” Castiel replied.

“Shit. _Shit._ ” Dean wiped a hand across his face. “I thought you were a goner. I was trying to say stuff to you but it was like you couldn’t hear me. And I was trying to move to push her away or fight her but it was – I couldn’t move – I know that sounds like I made it up but I swear…”

“I believe you,” Castiel said.

“Did you find out what she wanted?” Dean asked.

Castiel frowned. He turned his attention inward. And there, immediately – there it was. The place in his heart that hurt. Sharp and new and dark. He hissed through his teeth as he felt it. It wasn’t the overwhelming dark and burn of the revenant’s touch, but it was just a part of it. Enough to make his bones feel cold on the inside. He shivered.

“Cas? You okay?”

“I gave her what she wanted,” he said. “Or I tried to.”

“So it worked?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Dean seemed to want to say something, and then closed his mouth. He tried again, and said,

“I thought you could do it. Your belief. It’s strong.”

Castiel, realising that he was sprawled over Dean like a limp doll, took in a sharp breath and sat up. He blinked, slowly, letting his spinning head settle.

They were sitting just outside of the clearing, on a bed of leaves. The white tree still stood at the centre of a circle of bare earth. But something had changed.

Castiel got to his feet, and heard Dean standing up behind him.

“That happened right as you went unconscious,” he said.

They stared at it together.

“What did she want?” Dean asked.

Castiel thought about it.

“Your brother’s name is Sam?” he asked. Dean looked confused by the change of subject, but he nodded.

“Yeah. Sam.”

“She said her name was Jess. She said she wants Sam to know that she loves him,” Castiel said. “Is he here? I thought I heard you call out to him.”

Dean’s lips were pressed together so hard that they were almost white. After several seconds, he said,

“He’s around.”

The leaves rustled on the green trees above them. Together, Dean and Castiel stood with their hands in their coat pockets. In the clearing before them was a white tree. And on the ground, fallen away, was one of its boughs.

“We have to take that with us when we go,” Castiel said.

“Why?”

Castiel closed his eyes to feel the darkness in his chest.

“Because,” he said. “It’s mine now.”

––

Dean walked him home and they moved in silence, mostly. Castiel carried the bough on his own for the first part of the way, feeling like he should – but it was heavy, and after a while he let Dean take some of its weight, too.

“You okay?” Dean said, when they reached his house. They put the white bough down on the porch.

“I’m alright,” Castiel said. He touched a hand to his chest. The pain hadn’t let up. “But I think I’d like to be alone for a while. If you don’t mind.”

Dean clapped him on the shoulder. Without a word, he left.

Castiel cooked himself lunch. He ate it. He washed up. He sat on his couch. He listened to some music.

He cried. Quietly, alone, because he couldn’t have done it any other way. The pain was still there afterwards, but he felt better.

And that evening, Castiel decided to call his brother.

The phone buzzed in his ear. Castiel sat on his porch, and held it in one hand.

He felt calm.

“Yello?” said a familiar voice. Against all odds, Castiel found himself half-smiling.

“Gabriel,” he said.

“Well, well, well. It’s my Maine man.” Gabriel paused for a half-second. _“Maine_ man. Get it?”

“I do get it,” Castiel said.

“Uh-huh. I’m so unappreciated. Anyway, so, it’s been, what – over forty-eight hours now? No, longer. I don’t keep track well. You know, I think I have time-blindness.”

“Gabriel,” Castiel said, “there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“Oh? Don’t tell me you’re coming home.” Gabriel let out a little laugh. “Seriously, though, do. I’d feel better with you here instead of in the middle of some freaky forest.”

“No,” Castiel said. “No, it’s not that.”

“Oh? So what’s up?”

Castiel looked down at the big white branch on his porch. He thought about the new pain in his chest. He thought about Dean, and the revenant, and the wards, and everything that had happened since he’d last spoken to his brother back in New York.

“Sarah wasn’t real,” Castiel said.

A second of static.

Then another.

“Sarah,” Gabriel said slowly.

“She wasn’t real,” Castiel said. “I made her up. I did it spontaneously to get you to stop setting me up on dates with women from your work, and then it was just… I didn’t know how to stop lying. So I just kept doing it.”

“But…” Gabriel swallowed audibly. “But I didn’t set you up on _that_ many dates. It was only three or four…”

“It was more the feeling that they could have happened at any time,” Castiel said. “And I couldn’t have said no to them.”

“You could’ve,” Gabriel said defensively.

“They were usually already at the restaurant waiting for me,” Castiel pointed out. “So it was either go on the date, or leave them waiting there alone.”

“Right,” Gabriel said. “Well – well, great. Is that all you called to say? That your girlfriend that I was thinking you were happy with was actually fake? You know I’ve been worrying about you being alone after the break-up? I’ve been planning ways to try to get you two together, see if you could work it out? And it turns out she’s not even real.”

“I’m sorry,” Castiel said. “I shouldn’t have lied to you. And once I had lied to you, I should’ve figured out a way to make it stop. I want to make amends for the part of it that I did wrong.”

“Amends,” Gabriel repeated, non-committal. “What do you mean?”

Castiel breathed out. He wished, suddenly, that he’d ever taken up smoking, like so many of his coworkers back at Angelus. He didn’t know what it felt like to have the smoke hit his lungs and he didn’t particularly want to, but there was something in him that wanted to be sitting here with a gently smoking little self-destruct stick. Some urge in him to do something that ugly, that toxic.

Then again, he’d always hated the smell.

The idea of actually having a cigarette between his fingers was nasty. It was the destruction he suddenly wanted, a punishment, anything to stop him saying –

“I want to tell you the truth.” There. No going back now.

“About what?”

“Gabriel,” Castiel said, “I’m gay.”

With no hesitation, now, no pause for thought, Gabriel said,

“Wait, you are? Seriously? Oh. Wow. _Wow.”_ Castiel waited. “Castiel, I mean… I mean, I guess I should’ve seen it coming. Like, I should’ve known. You always did want to hang out with all the guy friends I brought home. And there was that time I walked in on you and Uriel and you both looked like you’d just –”

“Uriel was my friend,” Castiel interrupted. “Gabriel –”

“Right, right. Okay. Wow. I really didn’t see this coming at all. Isn’t that weird? It’s like, you think you know someone, and then it turns out there’s this whole other side to them that you knew nothing about.”

“Gabriel…”

“It’s kind of strange, actually. Like, it doesn’t feel great. Did you really have to hide it from me all this time? And with the fake girlfriend, too? Kinda feels like you were making me into an idiot. And I was trying to help with the dates and with relationship advice with Sarah, and actually you were going out and banging dudes or whatever.”

_“Gabriel._ Stop talking,” Castiel said, through gritted teeth.

“It’s not cool, man. What, is this supposed to make amends for lying about Sarah? The fact that you were hiding something else, too?”

“Listen.” Castiel tried to gather himself. Under Gabriel’s questions, he felt the calm that had filled him before the call being shaken. “Can you try to imagine it from my side of things? I was trying to figure out how to tell you, and you kept trying to get me together with women who I couldn’t turn down. And with our upbringing… there’s no way I could assume that you’d be alright with it.”

“Hey, look, I don’t care.”

Castiel frowned.

“You… don’t care?”

“Yeah. Whatever. I don’t care. I care that you lied, that’s all.”

“You don’t care that I’m gay?”

“Is the line bad or something? I. Don’t. Care.”

“What if I… what if…” _What if I want you to care?_ asked the voice in Castiel’s mind that was able to say what his mouth couldn’t. _What if I want you to be happy for me?_

It was a lot to ask. It had taken Castiel himself years to come to terms with himself. He couldn’t expect miracles from Gabriel all at once.

“I just care that you lied,” Gabriel said.

“Gabriel, I… I know it was wrong. I just… I wanted you to stop forcing all those women on me, but I didn’t want to lose you.” Castiel swallowed. “So I lied.”

Now, at last, Gabriel stopped talking. The quiet lasted for several seconds.

“You weren’t going to lose me,” Gabriel said. “You asshole.”

“Don’t call me that.” The word was nothing, usually, but coming out of his brother’s mouth it stung when the two of them had never been allowed to swear, growing up.

“Sorry. You jerk. I wasn’t going anywhere. I’m your brother.”

“Yes,” Castiel said.

“But?” Gabriel could hear the hesitation in his voice, and questioned it.

“But you always assume you know the best way to help, and you don’t listen. If you’d just decided you didn’t care I thought I was gay back when I was still in the city, and you’d decided the best way to help me was just to keep setting me up with women because obviously I just hadn’t met the right one yet…”

More silence. Deeper, this time.

“I wouldn’t just brush it off like that,” Gabriel said.

“You just said you didn’t care.”

“Right, but – I mean – you know what I mean,” Gabriel said. “I mean, it doesn’t change anything.”

“Exactly. If it hadn’t changed anything back in the city, you would’ve kept sending me on those dates.”

“I…” Gabriel faltered. For the first time since Castiel could remember, he’d actually left his brother speechless in an argument between them. “No. It’s not… it’s not that I don’t care. And obviously I would’ve stopped getting you dates with women, if that wasn’t what you wanted.”

“It’s not obvious,” Castiel said softly. “I swear. It’s not.”

“Then that’s on me,” Gabriel replied. “I… guess I assumed a lot of things.”

“Everyone does.”

“Right. I… huh. I guess it’s like – like the lies are started for you.”

“Sort of,” Castiel said. “But Sarah… that part was too far.”

“Well…” Gabriel paused for a long time. “Maybe you had to go too far because I was already way over the line,” he said.

“It didn’t feel great,” Castiel admitted. “All those dates. Never being able to make it work and knowing exactly why, and knowing that another one was going to happen whether I wanted it to or not.”

“I just wanted you to be taken care of,” Gabriel said. “And to have someone to take care of. Something that wasn’t your work to care about. I was worried about something happening, something like – like what happened at Angelus. And when it did, I thought you’d have Sarah, and when you told me she’d broken up with you I kept thinking about it, and now – now I find out that you went through the whole thing pretty much alone.”

Castiel bit his lip. Something about hearing his brother phrase it that way struck at the fresh pain in his chest, the revenant’s pain.

“I didn’t pay so much attention as I could’ve,” Gabriel said. “Because I thought you were in safe hands. I thought you were okay.”

“I was,” Castiel said. “I am.”

“Are you?”

Castiel thought of the forest, all the horrors of the past few days, his new pain. And Dean.

“Yes,” he said. “I am.”

“Well,” Gabriel said.

“Well.”

“I’m sorry I made you feel like you were trapped,” Gabriel said.

“I was trapped in a lot of ways. I’m sorry I reacted by lying. I wish I hadn’t done it.”

“I’m glad you told me,” Gabriel said, “and I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Thank you.”

There was a friendlier pause.

“How’s Maine, anyway,” Gabriel asked, after a moment. “You know that thing with the logging company up there I was talking to you about? There have been so many setbacks, Anna’s had to take personal control. Where even are you in the state? Maybe it’s gonna happen near you, I think they’ve finally got the permissions to start work in a couple days –”

Castiel lost concentration on his brother’s voice as he looked out from his porch, and saw Dean step out of the line of trees. Dean was holding what looked like a bag of food, and his face lit up when he saw Castiel. How long had it been since someone Castiel truly liked had looked that happy to see him?

“– Anyway, yeah, how’s Maine?”

“Maine is good,” Castiel said.

“Doing well on your own, then?”

“Maybe just doing well,” Castiel replied.

“Wh- you’re with someone? Who?” Gabriel demanded.

“Just someone I met. We’re going to have dinner together now.”

“What the f- you mean all that time in the city and you didn’t find anyone you wanted to share your life with, but you move out to the middle of nowhere where the chances of meeting literally anyone are, like, sub-zero, and you’ve got a _dinner_ date?”

“Goodnight, Gabriel,” Castiel said, half-smiling.

“What? No! You have to tell me more. What’s his name? What’s his deal? How did you find him?”

“Talk to you soon.” Castiel hung up. Dean stopped just shy of the porch, and looked up at him.

“I can go,” he said. “If you still want to be alone. But I thought you might want some dinner.”

“Stay,” Castiel said, standing up.

“You look pleased with yourself,” Dean said. “What, did you solve another forest’s problems?”

“I came out to my brother,” Castiel said. Dean’s face went soft.

“Oh,” he said. “Did it… go okay?”

“I think so.” Castiel glanced downward, towards the bag of food that Dean was holding – and as his eyes trailed down, his gaze caught on Dean’s legs. Just for a fraction of a moment, he thought that Dean wasn’t wearing the usual expected outdoor gear. He thought that maybe, instead, Dean’s legs weren’t – that they were –

“You hungry?” Dean said. And Castiel blinked, and Dean’s legs looked just how he’d expect them to look for a man standing in front of his house and asking such a normal question.

“Yes,” Castiel said. “Come inside.”

Later, when they were on the porch again – sober this time, just talking now and then and letting silence and half-glances fill the rest of the space – Castiel looked out at the forest with Dean by his side. The ache in his heart felt dark and cold and strong, and Castiel nodded internally at the pain.

_I know,_ he said to it. _I know. I like it here. I want to be here._

He looked at Dean.

_I want to be near him,_ Castiel said. _I don’t want to lose him._ The feeling was so sharp, so easy to understand, when the scar of hurt inside him was singing it to him. Like knowing he was deep in seawater by the burn of an open cut in the salt.

When he thought of the city, and his life there, the ache in his chest was quiet. Yes, it made him feel hollow with sadness to think of his old job, and the people he’d used to help. But hollowness was space. And space was a place to put something. Or perhaps just a place to sit and listen to, sometimes.

“What?” Dean said, catching him looking.

“Nothing,” Castiel said. “I was just thinking.”

“About today?”

“About not leaving.”

Dean snorted.

“You’re not fooling me with the whole self-sacrificing thing, you know. You’re still the guy with the law books and the jonesing for a widescreen TV. The revenant was only ever half of it. People need two things to move.” Dean shrugged. “A reason to leave, and a place to go. So maybe you don’t have the first one anymore. But soon as the second one comes up…”

“You really think I’d go through all that and then leave?” Castiel asked.

Dean studied him.

“Yeah,” he said. “And maybe you wouldn’t be wrong to. Maybe you’d leave to go help other people. But you’d still be going.”

“You could come.”

Dean grinned.

“I’m not who you think I am, Cas, if you think I could leave.”

“I mean it, though,” Castiel said. “You could.”

“Nah. I couldn’t leave my brother.”

“He could come too,” Castiel said.

“He doesn’t tend to move around much,” Dean said, with a little light in his eyes as though making a joke Castiel wasn’t quite in on.

Castiel didn’t know what to say. A second ago he’d felt so certain that he was going to stay here in the forest. But Dean being sure that he was going to leave, it weakened his own resolve.

Maybe he would stay. Maybe he’d go. Either way, Castiel didn’t want to fight, so he lapsed into silence. And the rest of the evening passed quietly, uneventfully. Until Dean murmured goodnight, and left.


	9. Chapter 9

When Castiel woke up the next morning, he lay back in his bed.

He’d had two bad dreams. Both of them flavoured with shadows. He touched a hand to his own chest, palm flat, and rubbed it.

The morning sun came through the windows in a shower of rich gold, as if to console him. Castiel watched the purple silhouettes of the wards twist against the wall for a while.

Everything was still. Calm.

He supposed he could take the wards down, now, if he wanted. Even if the revenant came back, he could talk to her. He could ask what was wrong. If she needed him to take more pain. Or if she wanted the pain back, that she’d given.

How strange, he thought, to be feeling someone else’s hurt all the way through him. Not bad, not exactly. In a way, it almost felt good. Or maybe it just felt right. It felt right to look at the sunlight on the wall and feel his chest twist with how beautiful it was, and how lucky he was to be here and to see it, instead of feeling nothing. It felt right to think of the day before and hurt just a bit about it, about Jess, about how she’d woken from sleep to protect the forest, about how she loved Dean’s brother.

It felt right to think of Dean, and feel an ache go all the way through him. As though his whole body clenched. As though his bones were trying to speak. Intense, and good, and bad. Dean, who sat next to him on the porch. Dean, who had run towards him with so much desperation in the forest, who had called his name so rough and raw when he’d thought Castiel was hurt. Dean, who didn’t trust him to stay. Dean who made him laugh. Dean who had learned more about him in a few days than any of his city friends had known in years. Dean who looked at him, looked at him like _that._ Dean, Dean, Dean.

He wanted Dean here now. He wanted to press their foreheads together, teeth gritted, hands wound into each other. He wanted Dean to put his fingertips on Castiel’s own cheek. He wanted…

He lay in bed, and wanted a hundred different moments, and imagined them all.

The sunlight moved across the wall.

––

When Castiel got out of bed, his stomach was growling – angry at him for spending too long lost in dreams. He went to the bathroom and relieved himself, and then washed his hands with soap and splashed some water onto his face.

In the mirror, he watched the droplets run down his cheeks. He looked into his own eyes.

Oh, he thought. Yes. It’s right there.

He’d wondered if he would be able to tell that something was different – if what the revenant had given to him would show on his face. And it did; in fact, it was obvious. He’d looked normal before, or he’d looked like what normal had used to be, which was a little distant. When he’d caught himself in a reflection, he’d mostly looked zoned out.

Now his eyes looked sharper. His mouth looked more set. His expression was – not harder, not exactly. Just more _there._ As a whole, he looked more present. Like the saturation had been turned up, or the song of himself was being played louder, like it mattered more.

Castiel eyed himself. This version of himself, who he was going to have to get used to.

He thought he could manage it.

When he went downstairs, he raided the fridge and found that he was starting to run out of groceries. Today, he’d have to take the walk over to the store and pick himself up a few things to keep himself going, and maybe look to see if they had some kind of local newspaper, or any ads in the window for jobs in the neighbourhood. It felt stupidly prosaic, but he needed some money.

He wondered whether Dean would want to come.

He wondered why he still somehow didn’t have Dean’s number. Dean just seemed to turn up whenever he felt like it, and that was the right time for him to be there.

Eating his breakfast – a couple of cereal bars, skinned of their foil wrappers and gulped down in huge bites – Castiel got himself dressed. Better to go sooner than later, after all. He didn’t want to have to think about making it home through the forest with the sun gone. It was going to be bad enough as it was, with only the map on his phone to guide him.

The forest welcomed him with a burst of rustling leaves when he stepped out of his front door, dressed and fed.

“Hello,” Castiel said in return. The waving boughs of the trees looked friendly, sweet with green leaves. “I don’t suppose you know where Dean is?”

A branch creaked.

Castiel shrugged, and started to move off. His phone said he needed to go north, which if he was right – which he probably wasn’t, but he was trying – was at a kind of right-angle to the way they’d travelled the day before to get to the clearing that belonged to the revenant. Each step Castiel took was a little hesitant. He thought this was the way, but… he pulled out his phone and checked again. The compass app he’d downloaded pointed in the exact same direction he was facing. That was a good thing, wasn’t it?

“Someone looks lost,” said a voice from behind him. Castiel’s head jerked round, and his eyes lit up. Dean was striding through the trees towards him, a grin on his face. “You know your house is about twenty paces back that way, right?”

“Not lost,” Castiel said. “Yet. Just going to get some groceries.”

“Oh, you’re going to Gordon’s? I can show you the way.”

“You can?” Castiel said, trying to sound as though he hadn’t been hoping Dean would offer, and apparently failing, because Dean gave him a bright knowing look.

“Sure,” he said easily. “We can take the coastal road. It’s the fastest way there, trust me. Better than tripping over roots all the way there. Those things get too damn long.”

“It’s necessary for the trees to survive, isn’t it?” Castiel asked, making conversation as Dean indicated the way they should go and came up to walk beside him. “The network of deep roots.”

“Yeah,” Dean said. “Reckon so.”

Castiel nodded.

Dean cleared his throat.

They kept walking.

In a way, Castiel had spent all morning with Dean, inside his head. Being with him in real life – having the actual, breathing Dean beside him – was so much better, and so much more awkward.

“Did you sleep alright?” Dean asked.

“Yes. You?”

“Yeah, actually.” Dean sounded surprised about it. “Things feel kinda different.”

They emerged from the deep woods onto the road that wound between the border of the trees and the sheer cliff that fell down to the water below. Castiel took in a breath of salty air. The tang hit the bottom of his lungs, while the wind whipped at his hair. For a second, he stopped to take it in. They were still so close to his house that Castiel thought if he turned, he’d still be able to see it through the trees. He hadn’t known a view like this was so close by. The sky opened up overhead, a wide empty space of blue and heat.

“C’mon,” Dean said. “This way.”

Together, walking in step, they began to head down the road.

There was something about the two of them being like this, Castiel thought. Just him and Dean, on this road with no one around. Just the sounds of their breaths and the _huff-huff_ of the waves and the sighing of the trees. Everything felt so alive. His heart was working, beat picking up a notch as they fell into a steady, brisk walk. He could feel the line of pain across it.

This was happiness, deep as pain. Hot like a sun. He caught Dean’s eye and smiled, and Dean smiled back.

“Do you think I could take the wards down on the house?” Castiel asked. “Just… I know her now. Jess. So maybe I don’t have to ward her off. If she wants to talk to me, she should be able to do that.” He was suddenly reminded, incongruously, of the open-door policy at Angelus. Office doors left open, so that employees always felt that they could walk in and speak to their boss at any time. He blinked away the memory. Even thinking about the office felt a thousand light years away from the tramping of his feet through leaves and the scent of the forest and the strange crackling sensation of being with Dean.

“Yeah, I guess we could take them down. Other stuff will come in, though,” Dean warned him.

“More dark things?”

“Nah. Well, nothing bad. Just, like, household creatures. They’ll move in.”

“What will they do?” Castiel asked.

“You know, just kinda live with you. They tend to mostly stay out of sight. If you leave out milk, they’ll clean and mend and stuff. Sometimes they can be grouchy. Throw things. But if you talk to ‘em or sing to ‘em, you’ll be alright.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Castiel said, and Dean glanced over at him.

“Wouldn’t mind living with a creature or two, then,” he said.

“No…” Castiel thought about it, and then said again with more certainty, “No.”

“Hm.” Dean was quiet for a few seconds. There was something in the way he held himself, a little tense, that had Castiel turning towards him and raising an eyebrow.

“What?” Dean said.

“I thought you wanted to say something.”

“Nah.”

A beat, and then –

“Well, actually,” Dean said. “I kinda wanted to ask. About the revenant. About what happened, exactly. I didn’t wanna bother you with it last night, but… so, you took some of the darkness into you.”

“Yes.”

“And it hurts?”

“Yes.”

“And… you’re okay with it?”

“I…” Castiel licked his lips, the salt air drying them out. “Yes. I am. Because she needed help, and I could give it. And it’s not so bad, it’s like… I don’t know. It’s different. But it’s alright.”

“That’s good.”

“Yes,” Castiel said. “I think so.”

“And you…” Dean paused, and Castiel saw from the expression on his face that this was the part of the conversation he’d been wanting to get to most. “She told you her name?”

“Jess,” Castiel confirmed.

Dean pressed his lips together. Castiel watched him, even as they kept walking down the path, risking tripping over a stone or stray tree root. Dean’s face was taut, full of that confusion and sadness that Castiel still didn’t understand.

When Dean looked at him, Castiel met his gaze. He didn’t say anything.

“She and my brother,” Dean said, the silence drawing him out in a way that questions couldn’t have done. “They were in love. And then she died.” He shook his head, took a breath.

“I’m sorry,” Castiel ventured quietly.

“I didn’t even know her too well,” Dean said. “Met her a couple of times, that’s all. But seeing what it did to Sam. He just closed up. Even to me. He got so dark. And then came…” His voice wavered, and then he carried on louder and deeper than before, obviously trying to sound tough. “The revenant came. I didn’t know it was her. I thought maybe it was something that had come to feed on Sam. Dark feeding on dark. But all this time, it was her…”

“She was helping,” Castiel said. “She was helping the forest. And maybe your brother, too. She was shaped to hold all the pain that the forest couldn’t take.”

Dean said nothing, for a long time.

“Can I ask you something?” Castiel asked, as they moved off the coastal road and began to head inland.

“Shoot.” It was terse, but not unfriendly.

“When I was speaking to the revenant, she said that the world has shapes for creatures like her. That she became what she needed to be.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So… that means…” Castiel thought for a second. “What does that mean?”

Dean shrugged.

“Some creatures are just like that,” he said. “Belief will shape you. Expectation, belief, whatever you wanna call it. Usually it’s kinda general. The belief’s like… like air, it’s all around, it’s just there. All the stories and things people say about a creature just kinda build up and then that’s what they look like.” Dean kicked at a rock on the path. “And then other times when you come into contact with a specific human, it’s less like air, more like a wind. Shaping you deliberately, like… individually.”

Castiel tried to take this all in.

“So… yesterday, when I was talking to Jess… I could have tried to change what she was, just by believing she could be something different?”

“I dunno. You sorta did that, didn’t you?”

“Oh. Maybe. I don’t know.” He frowned down at the ground. Maybe he hadn’t done enough. Maybe if he’d known he could have changed her, shaped her by believing something new about her, he could’ve helped her more. Stopped her pain completely, instead of just taking some of it.

“How do you know so much about –” Castiel began, but Dean cut him off.

“Do you think people get that too?” he asked. “Ever?”

Castiel considered pushing the question he’d wanted to ask, but decided to drop it. He’d never found hard questioning to be a good way to get answers out of Dean, anyway.

“Hmm,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe on the inside?”

“On the inside?”

“Yes. So, if you believed that I was a good person, maybe I would become shaped like a good person on the inside because I wouldn’t want to let you down. Or, on the flip side, maybe if you believe that I’m going to leave, I’ll leave, because I’ll feel like it was inevitable anyway.”

Dean cast him a sharp look, which Castiel met with neutral innocence.

“Okay,” Dean said. “But I couldn’t change you on the outside.”

“Um.” Castiel looked down at himself. “Are you trying to hint that you don’t like my clothing, or…”

Dean snorted.

“Wait,” Castiel said, “are you really?”

“What? No,” Dean said, “no. Cas. You dress great.” Was he going a little red? Castiel fought back a smile as he said,

“Great? Not amazing, then?”

Dean opened his mouth hesitantly to try to formulate an answer – Castiel could practically see the math equations floating in front of his eyes as he tried to piece together a response – and then he caught sight of the slight smile on Castiel’s face, and grinned.

“Jerk,” he said, and gave Castiel a quick push on the shoulder.

“You’re the jerk,” Castiel said, and it sounded too formal, and it made Dean laugh. Castiel reached out and shoved him in return. Dean’s arm felt strong and muscular under his hand.

“You’re an asshole.” The push came back even stronger, this time. Castiel’s heartbeat was up, just because they were touching each other, manhandling each other. The thoughts and imaginings of the morning suddenly didn’t seem so far away, and that had Castiel’s hands feeling clumsy, his mind spinning. His open palm was already against Dean’s arm, ready to shove, and he needed an insult to throw back, and he didn’t have one. He opened his mouth, and –

“You’re an ass… butt,” he said, his voice audibly wobbling halfway through the word. Dean staggered a little as he was pushed, and for a second Castiel thought that he’d actually hurt him. He stopped, concerned – and then realised that Dean was laughing, so hard that he was a little jelly-legged with it.

“Assbutt?” he managed. “Ass… butt?” The second time, he put the wobble in the middle. Castiel folded his arms.

“Listen,” he said. “I had a conservative upbringing…”

“Ass… butt,” Dean repeated, and now Castiel was starting to laugh with him. Dean came in closer, and clapped a hand to Castiel’s shoulder. “That,” he said, “was ridiculous.”

Castiel didn’t know what to say, caught between embarrassment and the happiness of having made Dean laugh.

The embarrassment wore off fairly quickly when they were a few steps down the road and Castiel realised Dean’s hand was still on Castiel, slid over onto his far shoulder so that they were walking next to each other with Dean’s arm around Castiel’s back.

“Come on,” Dean said, using the arm to move Castiel forward faster on the path. “Let’s get your damn groceries.” He smacked the flat of his hand against Castiel’s shoulder, and then let go.

The store, when they reached it, was a nondescript square little place with a neon sign outside that dustily flashed _Open_. The building nestled against the trees, squat and vaguely friendly-looking. Castiel pushed the door open, and a bell jangled over his head.

“Hi,” said a muffled voice from a doorway behind the counter off to one side, and then a man wearing a brown plaid shirt came out into the main store. “Oh – hey, Dean. Hey, new guy.”

“Gordon,” Dean said, and walked up to the counter to shake the man’s hand. Castiel followed suit. He’d never greeted a store owner like this, but he guessed it was more of a thing out here where there weren’t so many people always passing through.

“I’m Cas,” Castiel said, remembering at the last moment not to give his full name, and Gordon shook his hand firmly.

“Gordon,” the man said. “You moved in recently, then?”

“A few days ago,” Castiel said.

“He’s up at the Harvelles’ old place,” Dean said. Gordon met his eyes for a second, and a moment of wordless communication passed between them, before Gordon looked back at Castiel.

“You won’t be staying too long, then?” he said.

“Actually,” Castiel said, “I’ve got plans to stay for a while.”

“Uh-huh.” Another look between Gordon and Dean. Castiel found himself clenching up on the inside at the way they were talking without speaking.

“It’s the surroundings,” he said innocently. “The local wildlife, the creatures that have made this place their home. I don’t know if I could leave it any time soon.”

Now Gordon was looking right at him, and Dean had gone very still at his side.

“I see,” Gordon said. “Well, any time you need something, come on down here. Anything I don’t have, I’ll try to order in.”

“Thank you. Do you know if there’s any work, locally?” Castiel asked. “I’m hoping to pick up some odd jobs.”

“People put up notices on the board over there,” Gordon said, nodding towards a cork board scattered with papers that was up on the wall back by the door. “I think there are a few people looking for someone to do some heavy lifting.”

Castiel nodded. He tried to ignore the slight sink in his chest. He couldn’t have expected anyone to be after anything more academic, he told himself. Not out here. Of course people were just looking for manual labour. He knew he should have been counting himself lucky that he’d always kept himself in shape while he’d lived in the city.

“You heard about the trucks I saw down on the south road?” Gordon asked Dean, and Castiel turned away to pick up a basket and begin his shopping.

“Nah,” he heard Dean say.

“Apparently they had the logo of some kind of logging company on them.”

Castiel rounded the corner of an aisle, and found himself looking at a closed fridge with a glass door full of milk and yoghurts and butter. He began putting things into his basket at random. Back at home, he’d had a grocery store that he’d visited regularly, and he’d usually ended up going home with the same things each time he’d shopped there. Now, though, he had no idea what he liked from here. He decided to try a banana-flavoured yoghurt.

He watched Dean over the top of the shelves as he shopped. It hadn’t really occurred to him that he’d never seen Dean speak with anyone apart from him. Somehow, seeing him leaning on the counter and chatting with Gordon made Castiel’s heart hurt. Gordon laughed, and that made it worse. It was that good-bad feeling, all the way through him. Dean was liked and other people thought he was funny, too, and that felt good. And it also meant that he had no particular reason or need to pay any more attention to Castiel than to any other person – they didn’t just exist in their own little world with only each other for company.

And then Dean looked around, and caught Castiel’s eye, and smiled.

And Castiel thought, _we don’t, but maybe we kind of do._

It was stupid. There was no way Dean was thinking about that. Castiel tried to put those thoughts back in their box, and went back to looking at the various kinds of chocolate cookies on the shelf. And it was there again, that feeling inside – the happiness, as he shopped for groceries in the sunny little store, with Dean waiting for him at the counter. It was all so small, somehow. So little and yet so technicolour and real. Things felt as though they were moving slowly, and that was alright. That was good.

When Gordon rang him up, Castiel pulled out his wallet, but Gordon waved him away.

“Dean took care of it,” he said. “Here.” He threw a packet of mints into Castiel’s bag. “Welcome to the Samarbeid.”


	10. Chapter 10

Back at the house, Dean first helped Castiel take down the wards all around the house. It was surprisingly quick and undramatic, this time. No chasing shadows, no haunting laughter, no rising sense of confusion and fear. Just ceramics and garlic and mirrors, laid out in a clumsy stack on the ground beside the porch.

They turned their attention to unpacking the contents of the grocery bag, Dean stacking things neatly into the fridge while Castiel made them each some coffee.

“Why did you get two kinds of milk?” Dean said, putting them in the fridge door.

“I don’t know. I thought I wanted to try oat milk,” Castiel said. “To see if it’s nice.”

“It’s not great,” Dean said.

“You don’t know what I’ll think of it.”

“I know what any rational being would think of it,” Dean said. He shuffled some more contents in the bag. “Did you really get three different types of cookie?”

“I couldn’t choose,” Castiel said, defensive.

“Where’s your bread? What about any meat – are you vegetarian? ‘Cause you need way more protein, like lentils and that crap, if you’re not gonna eat animal products…”

“I’m not vegetarian,” Castiel said. “Did I forget to get any protein?”

“You’re a mess,” Dean said. “I paid for three types of cookie.”

“You didn’t have to,” Castiel said.

“It’s cool. Don’t worry about it.”

“No, I’m grateful.” Castiel poured boiling water out of the pot he’d used to heat it up in, and into two mugs with ground coffee in the bottom – and then went still. “Oh, no.”

“What? Did you spill some?”

“No, I just forgot to actually look at the board with the job notices on it.”

Dean was quiet for a few seconds, and then he said,

“So, you were serious about wanting to find work here.”

“I can’t really afford not to be,” Castiel said. “I can’t keep relying on you to feed my triple-cookie addiction. And I suppose some electricity and water bills will come through at some point, and at the moment I don’t really have the means to meet them.”

“I didn’t realise you were in trouble,” Dean said.

“It’s not that bad. I just need to find a little income. Maybe I could try online consulting. Put my law degree to some use.”

“Wouldn’t that have been easier in the city?” Dean asked. He’d finished up with the groceries, and accepted the coffee Castiel handed to him with a grunt of thanks.

“A lot of things are easier in the city,” Castiel said. “And faster, and louder, and more complicated.”

Dean’s eyes flicked over his face.

“You really like it here?” he said.

“Yes.” The answer came without hesitation. Dean snorted.

“I think you’re the only person I’ve ever met who could find a revenant in their house, go out into the forest to find it, come away with some kind of permanent supernatural injury, and decide that they like it here.”

“Well, when you put it like that…” Castiel took a sip of his too-hot coffee. It was nice and bitter.

“I’m glad you like it here,” Dean said.

Castiel met his eyes over his mug.

“You almost sound like you believe me,” he said.

––

It was much later, and they were sitting together on the sofa. Their legs were not touching. None of them was touching, in fact. Every little movement of their bodies was extremely aware of the fact that they were definitely and absolutely not touching, to the point where touching might have been less intimate.

They were watching TV on the big old box in the living room. The signal wasn’t too bad, and they’d managed to find a documentary on whales that they could both settle into. The narrator was talking in a voice slightly fuzzy with static, describing the migratory pattern of a mother whale and her calf.

“Cas,” Dean said.

Castiel turned his head to look at Dean. He wondered if this was it. If this was going to be the moment it all changed.

“If you could design your perfect day. What would it look like?”

By slightly narrowing of his eyes, Castiel asked a question in return. Dean shrugged.

“Just thinkin’.”

“You mean you weren’t paying full attention to the whales?” Castiel said with a touch of dryness, and Dean pulled a serious face and turned back to the TV.

“Right. Sorry.”

“No. It’s alright.” Castiel thought for a moment. “My perfect day… I don’t know. I haven’t ever really thought about it.” He considered. “There were lots of places I liked to go, back in New York. There was this deli I liked to visit… you’d love it. They had the most delicious food. So I could go there. Maybe to an art gallery. And when they did outdoor cinema nights in the park, that was kind of… special.” Castiel paused, frowning. “I don’t know, though. That kind of special that was so rare in the city, where it feels like something extraordinary could happen – it’s sort of everywhere here. You don’t have to wait for a magical night. They’re all just… special. So maybe it’d be here, the perfect day. I don’t know… I don’t know.” He looked at Dean. “That was a bad answer.”

“Nah,” Dean said.

“What about you?”

Dean’s eyes searched Castiel’s for a second, and then dropped away.

“Today was alright,” he mumbled.

Castiel stared at him.

“Dean,” he said.

Dean didn’t look up.

“Dean, you…”

Suddenly, Dean was on his feet. Castiel blinked, looking up at him – before he had time to think, Dean was walking out of the room.

“Dean? Dean, wait –” Castiel half-chased him out the room, Dean moving quickly, throwing the front door open and striding out of it. “Dean – what’s happening –”

Outside, the night air was biting. Dean kept walking away, until Castiel caught up and grabbed his shoulder and spun him around, staring at his face, trying to understand.

“What?” he demanded. “Did I say something wrong?”

Dean’s face was a mess, a confusion. He looked as though he were trying to look light and uncaring, but the fact that he was feeling something heavy was writ large across his face, undeniable.

“It’s fine,” he said roughly.

“Dean, I don’t…” Castiel paused, and then reached out a hand. Dean hissed in a breath as he flinched away from the touch, and Castiel pulled his hand back as if burned. “I don’t understand,” he said. Everything had gone sideways so quickly, like it always seemed to here.

“Look at me, Cas,” Dean said. He stepped back a couple of paces, and held his hands out. “Look at me. What do you see?”

“Just you,” Castiel said. “Dean.” He was starting to shiver without a coat on, out in the cold.

“Look,” Dean said harshly. “Actually _look_ at me.”

“I don’t understand,” Castiel said again. He folded his arms against the chill, and looked Dean up and down. He just looked like a person. Two legs, a body, two arms, a face. What was Dean hoping for him to see?

“Stop,” Dean said. “Just _see.”_

For a second, Castiel’s vision shifted – it blurred, just for a half of a blink of an eye. Just for a moment, he thought he saw – he thought that instead of – he thought –

And then he breathed out, and Dean just looked the way Castiel expected him to.

“You just look like you,” Castiel said.

Dean dropped his arms. He lowered his head. Castiel came closer, and this time Dean didn’t pull away. When Castiel put his hand on Dean’s cheek, Dean frowned, but he didn’t flinch – and after a second, he leaned into the touch.

“Dean,” Castiel said.

And Dean lifted his head, suddenly, and in a movement so fast that it was less of a lean and more of a lunge, he surged forward and pressed his lips to Castiel’s.

It was too hard, and the angle was wrong, and Castiel didn’t care. He closed his eyes, his body reacting for him, chasing Dean’s touch without him even having to think about it. It wasn’t a kiss, it was a mess, it was a reaching out and a rush and a desperate sudden static press of mouth to mouth – and then it was over. Dean ripped himself away. For a moment, less than a moment, his thumb was against Castiel’s lips, touching him so gently that it hurt.

“I don’t know why I did that,” Dean said, sounding wretched.

Castiel could only breathe.

“I don’t know why I did that,” Dean said again, and Castiel tried to move closer to him, but Dean put a hand on Castiel’s shoulder and locked his elbow straight, keeping Castiel away.

“Dean…”

“But when you leave,” Dean said, “if I’d never – I’d never felt what it was like to –”

Castiel reached up, and put his hand over Dean’s. For a second, it looked as though Dean was going to soften into the touch, move nearer – his head tilted the barest inch, his eyes flickered –

And then he’d turned. And he was gone, suddenly, too suddenly, leaving Castiel with a yawning space in front of him, nothing to fall forward into. Dean was back into the blackness between the trees.

“You know,” Castiel called after him, “for someone who keeps telling me I’m going to leave, you definitely do it a lot yourself.”

He received no answer.


	11. Chapter 11

Castiel tried the oat milk the next morning, and didn’t think much of it.

Even still, he filled his imagination with pictures of him slurping down oat milk next time Dean came around, just to show him.

That was, if Dean ever came back.

With a little shake of his head as though trying to dislodge the thought, Castiel went back to his cereal. Dean would be back. Of course he would.

Except –

No. He would be. Unless –

Castiel got to his feet. Enough. He pulled out his phone for some distraction, not something he’d needed much since arriving in the Samarbeid. Listlessly, he scrolled through social media – not liking anything or posting anything, of course. He’d gone completely dark on social media since getting fired, and he planned to keep it that way.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have anything here he thought was worth sharing. The forest was beautiful. His house was beautiful. It was just – he couldn’t post pictures of the forest for likes. Something about doing it would cheapen it.

It occurred to him for the first time that he could have taken a picture of the revenant, and posted it online. The notoriety would get him back to New York on the basis of the interviews, if nothing else, surely. He’d be back to the hustle, back to the metal and cement of the city and its steamy-breathed hug, with cameras clicking and texts flying and every minute filled up with noises and sights and strangers and smells, and –

Into the centre of his imaginings came a falling leaf of memory, spiralling down hushingly. The image of Castiel walking through the forest with Dean.

Crackling leaves underfoot.

Dean turning to look at him, saying nothing.

The wind through the trees.

Stillness.

Quiet.

His heart ached for it. He was still here, still in the forest, and he somehow missed it. Or maybe he just missed Dean.

In a half-moment of wry realisation, Castiel realised that if he ever did go back to the city, he’d just had a small taste of what that would feel like.

He’d dream of this place.

Was he going to leave? He’d told Dean a few times that he wasn’t going to, and he meant it when he said it, but – but he had lived in New York for so long. It had been his home, with all its rattles and rumbles. He’d carved himself a niche there, painstakingly. If the city called him back, could he say no? To stay out here in whatever strange fairytale this was, with no money and no job prospects and only a disappearing neighbour for occasional company?

But that memory of walking through the forest. It felt like silence, and then a relieved breath out.

Castiel wanted to live in the space between the silence and the breath.

He decided to settle for doing some housework.

By noon, the faucets were all sparkling, the grandfather clock had been wound, and he’d swept and tidied his porch. He wanted some kind of cleaner for the drains, he realised, and some tools so that he could have a proper look at his kitchen sink – and so, alone, he walked in the afternoon to Gordon’s store.

He bought his tools and his cleaner, as well as some birdseed and a bird feeder, and remembered this time to check the noticeboard for jobs. There was the expected calls for manual work; Castiel took pictures on his phone of the adverts. None of them paid well, and it sounded like it would be hard work, but it might be enough money to keep him going for a while.

Gordon smiled at him as he paid, and asked how he was doing.

“Not so bad,” Castiel said.

“That’s good to hear,” Gordon said. “How’s Dean?”

Castiel thought of Dean kissing him. Thought of him walking away.

“You’d have to ask him,” Castiel said, without rudeness.

“Uh-huh.” Gordon was watching him closely. “Never had him buying groceries for anyone else before.”

“Oh.” Castiel picked up his bag of food.

“He’s a strange one.”

Castiel smiled at him, and nodded.

“Take care, then,” Gordon said, and watched him leave.

On the walk home, the bag cut into his hand and the sea air scoured the bottom of his lungs and the revenant’s hurt crossed his heart like a dark sword-slash, and yet still – even with the pain, even not knowing where Dean was or how things stood between them, even still – he felt that warm sun in his chest.

He gripped his back of groceries. Still happy, he thought. Even still. Happy.

When he got home, he laid his new tools out on the table and promised himself to look at the kitchen sink later. The early evening was spent setting up his bird feeder, and stocking it with seed. His hands felt good and strong as they worked, and when he was done, he surveyed his handiwork with his hands on his hips.

It was good, he thought. He'd put it round the back of the house, so he’d be able to look down on it from his bedroom window and see the birds feed in the morning, if any came.

The forest smelled like wet earth and leaves and salt, and Castiel took in a huge breath, and then let it go. The sounds of the night-time animals were just starting up.

He missed Dean. Missed his solidity. Missed his smile. Missed having him within touching distance. It had only happened once, but missed his kiss. He wanted that kiss back in a way that felt like roots through earth, reaching for what they needed.

But if Dean wasn’t here, that meant Dean didn’t want to be here – and Dean had allowed Castiel his space the day before, to feel his way through the new shape of his heart. So now, Castiel could do the same.

He went indoors. There was a grumble in his stomach, but he knew that if he started cooking dinner and then eating it, he would crash on the couch watching TV and then climb up to bed and definitely would not get around to looking at the kitchen sink before turning in – so ignoring the pangs, he walked into his kitchen and retrieved his new tools from the scrubbed wood table.

Turning his attention to the sink, he frowned at it. He’d done a little DIY round his apartment in New York, mostly to stave off the landlord from coming to fix it and making a worse mess than there had been before – but he had to admit that this project felt a little beyond his knowledge.

With a shrug, he reached out and turned the faucet. Maybe if he heard some groanings or rumblings, it would give him some kind of clue as to –

Immediately, a gush of clear water spurted out of the tap. Castiel was so surprised that he leapt back with a little noise, and then blinked, and moved forward again to look at the water.

Had the tap worked this whole time? No. He was sure it had been stone-dry. He’d tried it several times over the past few days. Bending down, Castiel opened the cupboard and looked at the pipes, searching for answers.

In his cleaning fervour, Castiel hadn’t quite made it to the cupboard under the sink. The dust was still thick here - and all through it, over the pipes and on the bottom of the cupboard itself, there were little footprints.

Two-legged beings, Castiel could see. Two legs, and seven-toed feet. Something had been in here and left prints that came from no creature of the natural world.

And they’d fixed his sink.

Castiel stared down at the marks in the dust. He thought about the tools he’d bought and the cleaner he had and how he could possibly set some traps. But were these creatures dangerous? It seemed as though they’d got in here, fixed his sink, and were now nowhere to be seen or heard.

_You know, just kinda live with you,_ Dean’s voice said suddenly in his mind. _They tend to mostly stay out of sight. If you leave out milk, they’ll clean and mend and stuff. Sometimes they can be grouchy. Throw things. But if you talk to ‘em or sing to ‘em, you’ll be alright._

With a swallow, Castiel stood up and closed the cupboard door.

“Um,” he said out loud to his empty kitchen. “Thank you. For fixing the sink.”

There was no answer. Feeling stupid, Castiel went across to his fridge, considered his two kinds of milk – thought about giving them the oat milk – and then realised that was no way to get himself into the good books of these creatures, and picked out the cow’s milk. He poured a little into a bowl, and then set it tentatively out on the counter.

“That’s for you,” he said. “If you want it. I do have oat milk if you’d prefer it. But I think it tastes bad, so you probably wouldn’t like it. Not that I know a lot about the tastes of, um. Um. Um…”

He licked his lips.

“Good.”

He stood in his kitchen for a few seconds, and then headed out towards his front door. He opened it, and went down his porch, and stood in the clearing.

“Dean?” he called.

There was no answer.

“I just thought you might like to know,” Castiel said to the shifting trees. “In the house. I think the fairies came back.”


	12. Chapter 12

When Castiel woke up the next morning, he looked at the empty beam above his bed. Maybe instead of the wards, he thought sleepily, he should put something there.

His bed smelled like himself, now, instead of musty sheets. He rolled over and pressed his face into the pillow, pulling the covers tight around him. His skin wanted to be touched. He thought of Dean, and it was enough to lull him back into sleep.

In a half-dream, Castiel thought he heard Dean come into his room.

 _Hey,_ Dean said.

“You came back.”

_Sure. Let me in._

Castiel shifted. Dean climbed into his bed, and Castiel reached up to put his hand to Dean’s cheek – to slide it through his hair – and then he stopped. There. On Dean’s head. Something that felt dry and smooth and almost soft, something that to Castiel’s questing fingers felt like little branches.

He jerked awake, and his bed was empty.

With a sigh, Castiel lay flat on his back.

Would he ever get to share a morning with Dean? Ever get to lie beside him, knowing that it was exactly where they both wanted to be? That feeling between them, when they were together. The intimacy that they couldn’t control, that was just somehow _there_ because the two of them were there and they were together. Would he ever feel that here, in this bed? Would he look into Dean’s green eyes here?

It felt so close. But the pain in Castiel’s heart said,

_He doesn’t feel that way about you. You’re make-believing and dreaming too much. Just like you always used to before you picked up those law books instead of fairytales._

Castiel closed his eyes.

In his mind, he thought of things he knew.

He thought of Dean saying, obliquely, that his perfect day would be just living with Castiel. He thought of Dean kissing him. He thought of Dean saying, half-saying, that if he’d never kissed Castiel, he would have regretted it after they were separated.

 _If_ they were separated.

 _The world only makes sense when you’re in the city,_ said the pain. _You belong there. You don’t make sense out here. You haven’t worn your Versaces in days. Who are you? Who even are you?_

Castiel sat up, and got out of bed. He went to his window.

Down below, a little brown bird was pecking at his bird feeder. For the first time that day, rising in him like the sun, came happiness.

“I’m the person who made that,” Castiel murmured. “I’m the person who helped the revenant. I’m the person who came out to his brother.”

Maybe he didn’t quite know that person yet, Castiel thought, as he went downstairs. But maybe he could get to know that person. He didn’t feel as though it would be too hard. In fact, it felt as though – as though this was a person he’d been trying to get to know for a long time, and he was just now getting a chance to.

When he reached the kitchen, Castiel noticed that the milk-bowl was empty.

“Oh,” Castiel said. “I’m glad you liked that.”

He went over to his fridge and poured out a little more.

“Is that enough?” Castiel said. “I can get more. Um. Thank you. Again.”

He made himself a bowl of cereal, and sat down to eat it. In the same place as the day before, he pulled out his phone again to check his social media. Only two days, he thought, but it could become a routine, doing this. He would be okay with it being his routine. Waking up, and coming downstairs to fix himself breakfast in the quiet kitchen with the sunlight pouring gold through the windows, while inside him happiness grew warmer every day.

Castiel switched over to his emails. He’d avoided checking them for the past few days, knowing that he probably wouldn’t like what he saw – emails from Angelus finalising his termination, emails from coworkers pretending to show concern and really just fishing for details on what had happened. Sure enough, there was a whole litany of condolences in his inbox. He scrolled through them, an expression of distaste on his face, as he wandered through from the kitchen towards the living room, holding his bowl of cereal.

One of the emails was from an address he didn’t recognise. It had been sent a few days before, and the subject line only read, ‘Urgent’. Frowning, Castiel paused in his path towards the sofa and opened it.

He read it.

The cereal bowl tipped out of his hand. Castiel made a noise of dismay but didn’t stoop to pick it up. He read the email again.

Dean. He needed to tell Dean. One foot landing squarely in the puddle of milk he’d just made, Castiel made for his front door, which he threw open. He still didn’t have Dean’s phone number, and so he wandered helplessly out beyond the porch of his house, eyes scanning the trees.

“Dean?” he called. “Dean?”

There was no answer.

Castiel read the email again.

“Dean,” he called out.

Nothing.

He turned in a circle on the spot. He could try to head for Gordon’s store, and see if Dean was there. Or he could just wander the coastal road, hoping they’d run into each other. But there wasn’t time…

 _“Dean,”_ Castiel yelled.

“Okay, alright, I’m here,” said a familiar voice. “What, do you think you can just yell for me like I’m your personal –” Castiel turned around, and when Dean saw the expression on his face, the levity left him. “What?”

“Dean,” Castiel said. “I have an email. It’s from the realtors who sold me the house.”

Dean’s face dropped.

“You’re leaving,” he said flatly.

“What? No – no, listen, Dean, it says here that a substantial offer has been made on this house by a logging company who plan to start work on the forest. The law firm who represent the logging company, it’s my brother’s firm, Celeste and Celeste – they got in touch with my realtors.”

Dean stared at him.

“Well,” he said roughly. “What are you waiting for? Sell the place. Go back to the city.”

“No,” Castiel said, “you don’t understand. The logging company already have the right to work on some of the land around here. It says here they’re starting here in the forest, today. They’re going to start taking trees down, _today_.” He held out his phone. It occurred to him, suddenly, that this might not even be a bad thing. Maybe Dean would shrug and say it didn’t matter, they were just trees, more would grow. But there was some deep pit inside him that knew what Dean’s face would look like once he had proof, and –

And sure enough, just as Castiel was expecting, the colour drained from Dean’s face as he read.

“They can’t,” Dean said.

The lines on his face were suddenly brutish, hard. He looked different to how Castiel had ever seen him before, even when they’d been facing the revenant together. He looked single-minded, furious, white-hot with anger. And when Castiel saw him like that, something fell away.

It fell away.

In a rush, in a moment, it just fell away.

For the first time, Castiel saw it. What he’d been failing to see, every time he’d met Dean.

Out of the top of Dean’s head – impossibly, completely impossibly, but also absolutely undeniably – spiralled twin branches. Horns. No – antlers.

And those clothes of Dean’s, the ones he always wore, the ones that always looked like Castiel expected – they were gone.

In their place was skin. Dean’s skin, a smooth expanse of chest and muscled stomach.

And below that… soft hair.

Hair that thickened into fur, that ran down the length of two legs that each ended in a black cloven hoof.

Castiel stared. His mouth had fallen slightly open.

Behind Dean stretched the length of a torso covered in brown fur. Two more legs stood sturdy behind him.

“You…” Castiel began, and then stopped. He didn’t know what to say.

He wanted to reach out, to touch. To feel whether what he was seeing was real. It _looked_ so real. Castiel could see the muscles twitching in Dean’s legs as he shifted from one foot to the other. He could see the gleam of sunlight off Dean’s bare arms. No wonder he’d felt so strong under the clothes that Castiel had believed him into wearing. His arms were big enough that he looked like he could lift Castiel’s whole house.

“They can’t do this,” Dean said, and there was something in the tone of his voice that made Castiel feel absolutely sure that Dean would do anything to stop them.

“Dean –”

“They can’t,” Dean said. And without speaking to Castiel, he turned.

At a run, far faster than two legs could have carried him, he fled the clearing in front of the house. Castiel watched after him, phone still held out uselessly.

Dean was making for the coastal road. He was going to see it for himself, Castiel realised. He was running down that road, needing to see for himself the damage that was being done. Castiel watched after him. Dean was only in view for another few moments as he fled, but it was enough time for Castiel to see the power in him, the strength of him. Castiel swallowed, and blinked furiously. He didn’t know what to do with himself. What to think, where to go.

The trees all around him were shuddering. Their boughs were starting to move in a sudden wind. They were groaning with the strain of it.

After a few minutes, Castiel couldn’t take listening to it any longer. He went inside.


	13. Chapter 13

“I know,” Castiel said. “But is there really nothing that can be done?”

“Sir,” said the woman in the realtors’ office on the end of the line, “you don’t own the whole forest. There’s no way to stop them logging. They’ve obviously bought the land and they’re free to do whatever they want with it.”

“But –”

“You retain the rights to your own land, which is… let me check.” There was a clicking sound. Castiel wasn’t sure if she was typing or picking her teeth. “One acre. So, on that acre, they will not be able to fell any trees without your permission. Unless you make the choice to sell, given that they’re offering a sum far larger than the one you paid for it…”

“That’s not important,” Castiel said. “Surely this land is protected? They can’t just start chopping down trees?”

“Sir, I work as a secretary at a realtor’s office in New York city, but I imagine if they’ve begun work, it means they have the permits or whatever it is you need to cut down a tree in a forest in Maine,” said the woman. “Was there anything else I could help you with today? If you want to start the preliminary process of making a sale, I’d be happy to –”

“No,” Castiel said. “No. I won’t be selling. Thank you.” He hung up.

He began to pace around his house. From the living room into the kitchen, and then back again, and then upstairs, and then back down to the kitchen. After fifteen minutes, he went upstairs to pull on some clothes that he could go walking in. He was no use here, and he might be of some use down where the logging was happening. Maybe there was something he could do, just – just stand in front of all the trees somehow, or –

He kept thinking about Dean. Dean running alone along that coastal road. Dean – Dean who wasn’t human. Dean who had – who –

How had Castiel missed it? How had he believed so hard that Dean was human that he’d managed to make Dean actually _look_ human? Was that definitely what had happened? The revenant had said that belief and expectation was what made creatures the shape that they were. But Castiel had thought she’d meant big groups of people, whole cultures of belief. Could one person’s belief really change things that much?

Dean had said so, Castiel remembered suddenly. Dean had said one person’s belief could shape a creature. Like a strong wind instead of the still air always around them.

There was a clattering from outside his house. Castiel hastily pulled his t-shirt over his head and scrambled for the stairs. Surely they couldn’t be starting work right outside his house? If they were, he’d tell them where they could go. He wasn’t even sure, still, just why the thought of anyone chopping down a tree in the Samarbeid made his stomach turn. He couldn’t explain the devastation he’d seen on Dean’s face. But if those were workers with the logging company he could hear, he’d fight them with his bare hands before he let them begin work, all the same.

Castiel was going down the stairs two at a time – and then came up short.

In Castiel’s hallway, half-stumbling, was Dean.

Dean as he truly was, with his hooves struggling a little for purchase until he stepped onto the red rug and found some friction. His chest was heaving. When he saw Castiel standing on the stairs, he grabbed the bannister.

“You’ve gotta do something,” he said. “You’ve gotta stop them.”

“Dean –”

“They’re gonna tear it all down. They’re gonna kill my brother.”

“They _what?”_

“I tried to stop the trucks but there are too many of them and I’m no good when they’ve got so much metal and it’s everywhere, I can barely get near them, and they’re all so – their minds, they’re from the city and they don’t believe in me and there are so many of them, way too many, it’s – it’s like a wall, I can’t get in – they’re gonna kill him –”

Castiel came down the stairs. He grabbed for Dean’s hand and held onto it.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait. Listen. They’re only coming for the trees. Right? They won’t hurt anyone. Your brother will be perfectly safe.”

Dean stared at him.

“You don’t get it. My brother is what they’re coming for,” he said. “Sam. The Samarbeid. The _forest_.”

Castiel’s mouth fell open.

“They’re coming to tear it all down. Cas. They’re gonna kill him. You have to stop it. _Now.”_

“Your b- your brother…”

“Yeah,” Dean said, in a tone of voice that gave no quarter to this being big news. “So what are you gonna do about it?”

“Me?”

“You’re the only one who can,” Dean said. “I can’t get near enough to fight them, Gordon can’t get near them, Sam can’t touch them. Even Jess. The metal’s protecting them. There’s iron everywhere. In the trucks, in the – in the saws. And they don’t believe, and that’s stronger. It’s gotta be you.” His eyes were flinty. “So do something.”

“Dean, I – I called the realtors. There’s nothing… the company has the right to work on the land they’re logging.” Castiel squeezed Dean’s hand harder. “What they’re doing is legal.”

“What, and that means it’s right?” Dean demanded.

“I didn’t say –”

“You’re not gonna do anything because this is legal?” Dean snapped. “Because there’s no – no piece of paper about it sitting in some dusty old building run by fucking _humans_ – that means they’re just allowed to kill my brother?”

“I never said –”

“You know what? If you can’t help, just…" Dean's face was all angles, furious. "Just _fuck off_ back to the city. Go and read your law books somewhere else. You might as well, because Sam’s not gonna be here for much longer, and if Sam’s not here…” A wave of visceral pain passed over Dean’s face.

“Dean, I want to help –”

“Just go,” Dean said, with quiet venom. “Go protect those laws of yours. _Human._ ”

“You really think that’s what’s important to me?” Castiel demanded. “Really? You think I got fired from my job as a lawyer because I was just so _good_ at never questioning the law? You think I don’t know what it’s like to see someone the law should protect and know that it won’t help them? You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know you won’t save my brother,” Dean said, backing away.

“Don’t _leave,”_ Castiel said.

“Then think of something!”

“I can’t just come up with a way to make logging illegal in the space of –” Castiel broke off. He felt his eyes go slightly unfocused. “Oh.”

Dean turned his head ever so slightly to the side, sharply.

“Oh?”

“If…” Castiel swallowed. “But there’s no… but… _oh.”_

“Cas,” Dean said urgently.

“Yes – yes. I need…” Castiel felt it come together in his mind, dovetailing neatly. “Ah.”

“Cas. Talk to me. Do you have something?”

Castiel looked at Dean. Saw him, all fur and skin, standing in his hallway. He smelled like the forest, earthen, almost sweet.

“I need to make a call,” Castiel said. “To my brother. And I need the number of the Maine Forestry Service. And I need… I don’t know. I’ll figure it out. You need to go back to the logging site. Buy me as much time as you can. Get as close as you can. Anything you can do. Cause as much of a scene as you need to get them to stop for as long as possible. I’ll be there.” He turned away and headed into his living room, and then ducked his head back out the door. “Also, yes. I do have something.”


	14. Chapter 14

More than an hour later, Castiel was walking along the coastal path.

He moved as quickly as he dared, one hand held up and clasped in a very loose fist.

He walked past the store. Gordon saw him, and came outside.

“Have they started logging yet?” Castiel asked.

“No,” Gordon replied. “We’d know. The forest would be – it’d be different. I saw Dean pass up by this way.”

“Good,” Castiel said.

“He looked, uh. More himself.”

“Yes,” Castiel said.

“You going to the logging site?” Gordon called, as Castiel kept walking.

“Yes,” Castiel called back.

“You gonna stop them?”

“Yes,” Castiel said.

“You want a mint?”

Castiel stopped. He turned around. Gordon – who, now that Castiel really looked at him, had a kind of orange glow in his eyes and an inhuman lightness to the way that he moved – came closer. He held out a packet of mints.

“I don’t know why you’re doing this, stranger,” he said.

A few answers ran through Castiel’s mind. _For Dean. For Sam. For Jess._

For himself. To act like the person he felt he was.

“Just because,” he said, in the end. There were too many reasons to explain. Too much. Gordon didn’t seem put off by the answer, though. He proffered the mints.

“Maybe next time,” Castiel said. “But thank you.”

It was only when he saw Gordon’s slightly sharp-edged grin that Castiel remembered there were a lot of stories about supernatural creatures and food and what it meant to accept it, and found a little room in his overworked chest to be relieved at his own choice. He remembered the mints Gordon had put in his grocery bag and made a note not to eat them, if he made it back to his house.

“Next time,” Gordon said.

He looked down at Castiel’s fist.

“Wait. Is that… her?”

“Yes,” Castiel said.

“But… how is she so…?”

“Belief,” Castiel said, starting to move away. He didn’t know how much longer Dean would be able to hold them off at the work site. It was a miracle that they hadn’t started already.

“But she’s shaped that way to hold…”

“I know,” Castiel said. “I’ve got it.”

“You…?”

Castiel gritted his teeth and walked onward.

He followed the grumble of trucks that shook the ground and suffused the air with a thin petrol reek, followed them all the way to the south-most edge of the trees. He was sweating. He was stiff and tense in every muscle. He wanted, so much, to stop.

He didn’t stop.

As the rumbling grew louder, Castiel cut away from the coastal path and in through the trees. He was near, now. So near. The land under his feet was quaking. The trees were waving their branches fitfully.

_Sam,_ Castiel thought. Dean’s brother. The one Dean had said was nearby. The one Jess had said she loved, too – the one whose pain she had woken up to take away. This was him.

“It’s going to be alright,” Castiel said to the trees. “I’m going to make it alright.”

The trees groaned in answer. And Castiel left them behind, emerging out of the edge of the forest.

The light was bright out here. Twenty feet away, Castiel saw a line of cars and three huge trucks, the third just pulling up and turning off its engine. Scattered across the open grassland was a series of people wearing high-visibility jackets and hard-hats. They looked prosaic and silly and frightening in their normality. Some of them were whispering to each other.

And – in front of them, with his fists tight and his back to Castiel – was one very clearly angry Dean.

Dean, who looked like a human again. The force of the belief of these people, Castiel thought. It had to be. He tried not to think too hard about what he knew Dean truly looked like. The worst thing he could think of right now was Dean being exposed to all these people who would grab for their phones, who might even try to hurt him.

“Sir,” said one of the hard-hats to Dean, “please. We’ve been through this. You have no ground on which to stop this logging. It is not going to be a completely destructive process. The company I represent plan to give one percent of the proceeds from this project within the next three years to a local conservation organisation that will plant trees to replace the ones that we will be –”

"You city people don't know shit," Dean said.

"Well." The hard-hat narrowed their eyes. "That was rude, sir. There's no need for rudeness. I –"

"You have no idea what you're talking about. You think this is replaceable? 'Course you do. That's what you assholes are all about, right? Everything being replaceable with somethin' else or someone else. Always a way to fill the space so you never gotta feel it."

"Sir, you're raising very interesting points, and I'd love to discuss them with you –"

“Shut the hell up,” Dean said.

“I will not shut up,” said the hard-hat sharply. “I came down here because I was made aware that you were getting in the way of the saws and causing danger of injury. It was felt necessary to have someone higher up from legal on the site, strictly because of you. I travelled for an hour and a half to be here. I will _not_ shut up.”

“I think you should,” Castiel said, and he stepped forward. A ripple went through the hard-hats as they noticed him for the first time, and Dean swung around. Castiel met his eyes, and nodded.

“My turn,” Castiel said to the hard-hat who had been speaking. Someone from legal, they’d said. “May I have your name?”

They shifted.

“Anna,” they said. “Anna Celeste.” Castiel swallowed. So, this was _the_ Anna Celeste, one half of the partnership who ran his brother’s law firm. “Look, whoever you are. I’ve got no problem with you. We don’t need to have a problem. Why don’t you step aside so that our workers can make a start, and we’ll just iron out these qualms that the two of you seem to have about our practices?”

Castiel waited for them to stop speaking, and then ignored what they’d said.

“Anna Celeste,” he said. “So, you’d be the Anna Celeste whose signature is on the contracts surrounding this project, then.” Castiel said.

Anna looked at him uncertainly.

“Yes,” they said, as though not sure what it was they were admitting.

“The contracts that you had drawn up, since the logging company your law firm represents doesn’t actually own this land. This is state-owned land, that you’ve been contracted to clear.”

“How did you…”

“The Maine Forest Service has copies of all relevant documentation,” Castiel said smoothly. “For their records. I gave them a call, and they were happy to share the details with me.” _Once I told them exactly what Gabriel said to tell them,_ Castiel omitted to say.

“The Forest Service? Why did you –”

“Oh,” Castiel said. “Did I not mention? There’s something here that’s been overlooked.”

He held up his hand. As one, the hard-hats squinted at it.

“What is it?” Anna demanded impatiently.

“What is it?” Dean muttered.

Castiel glanced towards him, and smiled. His every nerve was straining. He didn’t know how much longer he could keep going, but he forced himself to appear calm and unruffled. There was no other way that he was going to convince Anna and the logging company to leave. He hoped that his legs trembling wasn't visible.

“It’s Jess,” Castiel said. And opened his hand.

There, in his palm, was Jess.

She was small. Delicate. She looked exactly as Castiel expected she would, believed she would, because he’d gone to her tree in the forest and said to her,

_If I can make Dean look like a person with two human legs, I can change your shape, too. Can’t I?_

He’d said,

_Please let me. For Sam._

And she’d said,

**The pain will need somewhere to go for as long as I am not shaped to hold it.**

And Castiel had gritted his teeth and said,

_Yes. I know._

Now, standing in front of forest workers and lawyers and Dean, sweat dripped down Castiel’s brow. The scream in his bones was unbearable, all-encompassing, and he was handling it by the barest of margins, with only the knowledge that he just had to get through this part, and then he could give the worst of it back to Jess, seeing him through. He had to believe he could stand it because he _had_ to be able to stand it. There was no other choice.

“What do you have there?” the lawyer, Anna, demanded.

Castiel held out his hand to them. On his lined palm sat serenely a single, greenish butterfly, with brown and white spots.

“It’s a bug,” Anna Celeste said, peering over at it.

“It’s a butterfly,” Castiel corrected them. “More specifically, this is a Hessel’s Hairstreak butterfly. None have ever been recorded in this area since it’s well-known that they live in wetland areas. But here one is.”

“Amazing,” said Anna. “And I’d love to hear all about it, if you’d just step to one side with me, and –”

“The Hessel’s Hairstreak,” Castiel said, “is an endangered species in Maine.”

Anna Celeste opened their mouth with a dismissive expression on their face, and then – quite suddenly – their expression dropped.

“Oh,” they said. “Oh no.”

“Oh no?” demanded one of the other hard-hats nearest to them.

“Oh no?” Dean asked, in a very different tone of voice.

“In your contract,” Castiel said, “that you personally signed in agreement with the Maine Forestry Service, it is clearly mandated that the discovery of any endangered species in the logging area will halt the project, so that the Forest Service can come down and perform a full inspection.”

“No,” Anna said. “No, I –”

“If the area is found to be a habitat for the endangered species, work will cease.”

Anna Celeste stepped closer.

“What did you say your name was,” they said.

“I didn’t,” Castiel replied. Anna was staring at him.

“Wait. Wait, I – I know you,” they said. “I’ve seen you before. Somewhere recently.”

Castiel shifted. He struggled to keep his face impassive.

“You’re the brother of one of my juniors, aren’t you? That’s right. You’re the one who got fired for leaking evidence. It was on the news.”

“Cas?” Dean said.

Anna Celeste was almost smiling.

“I thought I knew your face,” they said. “What, did you run away to live in this backwater? Or are butterflies the only clients who’ll hire you, these days?”

“Cas,” Dean said again. Castiel didn’t look at him. Instead, he set his gaze on Anna.

“I made sure an innocent man did not go to prison for a crime he didn’t commit,” Castiel said, in a low voice. “I upheld justice in the face of a law that was not just.”

“You were a prosecutor who leaked evidence to the defence,” Anna Celeste said.

“I was a person,” Castiel replied. “Who refused to see a man be punished under the law when he had not _broken_ the law. He was innocent but he was going to be found guilty, without the evidence I gave him and his defence team.”

“You did the defence’s work for them,” Anna said. “In a murder trial.”

“His defence was government-appointed and underpaid and overworked and they missed the bloodwork results that exonerated their client. They’d given up. His only chance was if I…”

“You’re a disgrace,” Anna Celeste interrupted. And even through the crackling of his every nerve, Castiel felt something in him go cold. The pain he carried, as though it had been waiting for his call, found its target. When he spoke, every word was sliced to neatness by the hurt inside him.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I am. But you know what else I am? I’m a person who would go that far to stop something unjust from happening.” He squared his shoulders. “I would lose my house. My job. My car. My circle of friends. My entire life. I gave it away to help a man who never thanked me. So I ask you this. You’ve realised that you’re up against me in this fight. You know what I’m prepared to do to win. So the question now is… what are _you_ willing to lose?”

Anna’s face went still, their certainty frozen.

“What will you do?” Castiel asked. “What will you give?”

“I –”

“You already gave away your name, Anna Celeste,” Castiel said. “And around here, that’s enough to cause you pain.”

Anna stared at him, clearly unnerved.

“Go home,” Castiel said. “Go away. Go back to the city. Wait for the inspection to tell you that this project is over. Because it _is_ over. And if you want to argue otherwise, feel free. Just remember who you’re dealing with.”

Castiel set his jaw. He kept his hand soft. The butterfly opened and closed its wings, and he felt the brush of Jess’ touch against two of his fingertips. He was on fire on the inside, immolating. Outside, he was marble.

Anna Celeste was wavering. He could see it.

For a moment, Castiel let his teeth unclench. He relaxed his brow. He unwound the locked-up muscles all down his back. For a moment, Castiel stopped believing that he was still shaped like himself despite the pain.

For a moment, he let the shape he should have, the shape Jess usually had, reach out its hungry fingers for him. With his own belief turned away, Castiel felt the belief all around him hook its touch into him.

He felt his teeth lengthen. Felt his eyes go dark, dark, dark. Felt his bones stretch and shadows dance at the edge of his clothing. It felt good, it felt _right,_ to take all this terrible pain and let it out and be furious, be angry, be incandescent with cold fire when he said,

**I have your name. Anna Celeste.**

Castiel watched Anna’s face. As he stared them down, he watched their face blanch, their mouth fall open. He pulled the shadows back in. Stuffed the hurt and anger back into a soft human body that wasn’t made to carry it, that was being held together by sheer force of will. In a moment, it was gone.

“Out,” Anna yelled suddenly. “Everyone, back. By the terms of this project’s contract, this work is no longer lawful pending an investigation into the existence in this area of an endangered species.”

They turned back towards Dean and Castiel, just for a moment.

“Don’t come back,” Dean said.

They turned away.


	15. Chapter 15

Castiel waited.

He focused on his knees. He believed in his knees, he told himself. He believed they could keep him upright. He could feel them creaking as the hard-hats got ruefully into their trucks. He could feel them shaking, ready to give, as the trucks began to pull away. He could feel them tremble, almost collapse, as Anna met his eyes through their car’s window, and shook their head.

As soon as the trucks had pulled away and Anna was out of sight, Castiel folded.

Shadows smouldered out of him. He could feel them leaking out of his fingertips, his eyes. He could feel every nerve in his body, every tiny root in the tree that they made under his skin, alive with a pain that could no longer be borne.

But it could. It could. He had to bear it. He couldn’t die.

“– tell me what to do,” he caught Dean saying, and realised that he’d passed out briefly, kneeling on the ground with his head bowed, one hand still raised with Jess sitting inside it. “Cas, c’mon, I –”

Castiel looked up at Dean. His human legs were gone again. Atop his head was a crown of antlers, silhouetted against the blue of the sky. Castiel blinked at him slowly, trying to find a way to believe he could still talk.

“Dean,” he managed. And then, like a wave, unstoppable and incomprehensibly huge, came the darkness.

And it swallowed him whole.

Castiel didn’t think he existed.

Castiel didn’t think.

He had no body. He was nowhere. There was only darkness. And hurt. Nothing else. It was the beginning and the end of everything. It made him. It _was_ him. Everything was a flurry, a frenetic whirl of black, an impossible scream. It was shadows laughing. It was eyes hollowing. It was skin paling, weakening. It was rush, rush, rush, and press, press, press, and fear – it was fear. And he was never going to get out. He was never going to be free of it.

It was going to be like this forever, the unending push and hurry and desperation of a fear and pain that didn’t know how to stop. There was nothing that could end it, not now, not ever. Hope was useless here. Hope only made it hurt more. Hope was a upward-pointed knife to fall on in the dark.

Castiel had no breath. He rattled. He ached. He was lost in the skidding whirling horror. He would never be found, never be seen, never feel again as he had once –

Then.

Through the darkness – through Castiel – fell a leaf.

Slowly.

The leaf spiralled.

The leaf was silent.

The leaf landed, in the darkness.

There was a moment of quiet, and then a breath of relief. Castiel breathed out.

“Hey,” said a voice in his mind.

Into the total blackness, towards the single leaf, Castiel said,

“Hello?”

“How did you do that?” The voice sounded soft and genuinely interested. In its tones was breeze through branches, groans of tree-trunks.

“Sam?” Castiel said.

“Yeah. I – sorry about being inside your head. I don’t normally do this. But you were about to die, so. I thought I’d just come in and help.”

“I…” Castiel tried to look down at himself, and there was nothing. “Am I…”

“Not dead,” Sam said.

“Oh. Good.” It was an understatement, but Castiel didn’t know how to express being pleased that he was still alive. It wasn’t a feeling he’d had all that often before coming to the forest, but now that he was here it seemed to be coming up more frequently.

“But how did you do it?” Sam asked again. “Get Jess to look that way?”

“I, um.” Castiel took a moment. He was still reeling from the pain, though he could no longer feel it. “I… I needed her to look different,” he said. “I needed a butterfly. I tried finding one of the fairies first, the ones that mended my kitchen sink, to see if I could make one of them look like a butterfly. But I couldn’t find them. And I couldn’t find Dean, he was at the site holding off the loggers. And the only other creature whose shape I thought I might be able to change was… was Jess.”

“But she can’t change shape,” Sam said.

“She can. When she isn’t in all that pain,” Castiel said.

“But – how?”

“I don’t know,” Castiel said. “I had to hurry, I just – I tried believing it all away at first. But I couldn’t believe that the pain was gone, it was just too much. It was too real. So instead all I could do was believe that I could hold it without dying. And then when I had it, I just believed she could look like a butterfly. Hessel’s Hairstreak.” He’d said the name over and over to himself on the way to Jess’ tree. _Hessel’s Hairstreak. Endangered butterfly. Brown and green. Hessel’s Hairstreak. Endangered butterfly._

There was a pause, and then Sam said,

“It’s… it’s my pain, you know.”

“I know,” Castiel said. “Or – well, it’s Jess’ now, I suppose.”

“No, it’s mine. I – she – we’re the same. Like she’s a part of me. The part that holds the pain.”

A dead white tree in the green-gold forest, thought Castiel. Not quite the same, but a part of each other.

“I wish it didn’t have to be that way,” Sam said.

Castiel said nothing.

“But I can’t just make it go away,” Sam said. “Can I?”

“I don’t think so.”

“And neither can you?”

“No,” Castiel said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Sam’s voice sounded tired, but not unkind. “And you’ll be okay. You can go back to your body now. It’s safe.”

“Thank you,” Castiel said.

“No – thank you.” There was a pause, and then Sam said, “Look after my brother, would you?”

Castiel paused before he said,

“I will do that.”

“I believe you will,” Sam said. The leaf in the dark was swept up in a sudden breeze through the dark. “What do you believe?”

Before Castiel could answer, he slammed back into his own body, and felt his heart give a terrible, wonderful, reckless _thump-thump._

And a familiar voice said,

“Cas?”


	16. Chapter 16

When Castiel blinked awake, he saw the spreading branches of trees. And beneath them, a pair of worried green eyes.

“Cas,” Dean said again.

Not trees. Antlers. Castiel breathed out.

“You’re alive,” Dean said.

“Yes,” Castiel agreed. He sat up, and looked about him. He wasn’t at the edge of the Samarbeid anymore – it looked as though they were deep among the trees now that he looked around, and when he glanced over his shoulder, he went still.

They were sitting just outside the clearing of the dead white tree.

“Sam brought you here,” Dean said. Castiel looked over at him. Dean was kneeling on the ground, his four legs folded beneath him. As Castiel watched, the muscles in his animal torso shifted under the fur.

“What happened?” Dean asked. “Cas?”

Castiel thought about that for a second.

“I met your brother,” he said eventually.

Dean moved, his head jerking back in shock.

“He spoke to you?” he said. “But he doesn’t talk to people. Not after he lost her. Jess.”

Castiel lifted a shoulder.

“What did he say?”

“I don’t know. I think… I think he saved my life. Took back what I couldn't hold anymore."

Dean said nothing. For a while, the two of them sat still on the forest floor, just breathing. Castiel took the time to enjoy it. In and out. Smell of soil and leaves and sharp sap and musky animal.

"He asked me what I believe,” Castiel said eventually, because it looked as though Dean were about to get up, and Castiel didn't want to get up. Not yet.

“What did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Oh.” There was a pause. “Well… now I wanna know. What’s the answer?”

“I…” Castiel said, and then stopped. Because fluttering up to him, making its way through the trees on soft, tiny wings, was a butterfly.

A green and brown butterfly. Endangered.

A Hessel’s Hairstreak.

“Jess,” Castiel said. The butterfly didn’t stop to land on him, or even spin a loop around his head. It flew, wings flashing, right past Dean and Castiel, and over to the tree behind them. The dead white tree. And on the end of the jagged and pitted stump where Castiel’s white bough had fallen away and down to the ground, it settled.

"She's not a revenant," Dean said.

"No."

"Does that mean Sam has all the… that he didn't give it back to her?"

The butterfly flapped its wings on the tree, catching the sunlight so the bright green flashed.

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe he didn't give it _all_ back to her. Maybe he's helping her too now. Giving her a little more space."

He looked to Dean.

“What do you believe?” he said.

Dean thought about it. His face was serious.

“I believe,” he said eventually, “I haven’t eaten today, like, at all. And it’s past lunch time.”

Castiel nodded thoughtfully.

“I believe I have cookies at home,” he said.

“I believe I will eat all of those.”

“I believe you’ll have to fight me for them.”

“I believe,” Dean tipped his head down, lowering his antlers slightly, “I’ll win.”

––

“We got lucky with the contract,” Castiel said, as they walked back towards his house. “I thought I was going to have to threaten the logging company and make the Forest Service sound more important than they actually are, you know, legally speaking. As in, I’d have to act as though the Forest Service has any real power here to stop logging. But then when I called the Service they said they had a copy of the contracts on hand because they had been part of the negotiations. I asked to see it, used my brother’s advice, said I was associated with Celeste and Celeste, and they emailed me a copy. And it wasn’t a lie – I am associated, I just meant my brother works there, and they didn’t question it, they just sent over the file. And there it was in writing. Agreement to cease work if an endangered species lived in the forest. It must be because Celeste and Celeste had so much trouble getting the paperwork through for this job. They must have thought putting that clause in there was a gesture of goodwill to convince everyone to sign the papers, and that it wouldn’t come back to bite them. But we made sure it did.” He realised how long he’d been talking, and looked over to Dean, who was watching him with a light in his eyes.

“Not a bad plan,” Dean said.

“Not bad?”

“Yeah. It was okay. All the stuff back there with contracts, names… ”

Castiel raised an eyebrow at him.

“I’m just saying,” Dean said, “you fit in here fine sometimes. That’s all.”

“Did you hear that the fairies have moved back into my kitchen? Did I tell you that part?”

“Hey, nice…”

They emerged out into the clearing in front of Castiel’s house.

“Um,” Castiel said. “Can I ask you about something?”

Dean paused.

“I’m hungry,” he said.

“I know. But this is important.”

Dean swung around to face him. Castiel took him in, as he stood there: the head, arms, and torso of a man, but the antlers, legs, and body of a stag. Under Castiel’s scrutiny, Dean shifted uncomfortably.

“I didn’t know you weren’t human,” Castiel said softly. “You didn’t say.”

After a moment, Dean looked down at the ground.

“Didn’t much know what to say,” he mumbled. “You just kinda… I mean, I walked into your kitchen, you turned around, next thing I know I’ve got two human legs. I didn’t even have to say anything about who I was. You just kinda decided for me.”

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” Castiel said.

“I know. It’s okay.”

“Can I…”

Castiel half-reached out with a hesitant hand, and then stopped. Dean eyed him, one hoof pawing at the ground – and then he nodded.

With a single step, Castiel moved into Dean’s space. He found himself going slowly, as if he were trying not to frighten a wild animal. When he lifted his hand, he kept his eyes on Dean’s face, watching for discomfort, or a sign to pull away. But Dean’s face was steady when Castiel’s fingertips brushed the soft firmness of his antlers.

Gently, slowly, Castiel traced his touch over them. He watched his own fingers move, watched them discover the texture of Dean’s antlers, the whorls in the bone just discernible beneath, and the velvety smoothness above. They were warm to the touch.

He could hear Dean’s breaths. See the way his bare chest moved.

“What d’you think,” Dean said, and he spoke casually, almost jokingly, so Castiel knew it mattered.

“Beautiful,” he said simply.

Dean’s face, just for a moment, looked open and surprised.

“I’m sorry I thought this wasn’t who you are,” Castiel said. “I’m sorry I just assumed… I just assumed everything. I’m sorry. I’m glad I get to see you. The real you.”

They were standing so close. Dean didn’t seem to know where to look. He licked his lips, looking off to the side with wide eyes, and then bowed his head.

Castiel leaned forward the few inches it took to lightly rest their foreheads together.

Dean murmured something.

“What?” Castiel asked quietly, just between them.

“I said, I don’t want you to leave.”

Castiel pressed his forehead more firmly to Dean’s, and let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

“You still think I’m planning on leaving?” Castiel asked.

“Mm,” he said.

“Come on,” Castiel said. “Surely not.”

“Mm.”

The ache in Castiel’s chest – the hurt that he’d taken, still crossing his heart after he’d given most of it back to Jess and the forest again – understood. It understood.

“If you don’t want me to leave,” Castiel said, “you should ask me to stay.”

Dean’s head dropped lower, pushed even harder against Castiel’s.

“Mcan’t.”

“What?”

“I can’t, Cas. It’ll just make it worse when you go.”

“I know,” Castiel said. “But if you ask me not to go, I won’t.”

There was a long, long second of silence.

And then another.

And then, Dean breathed out. And as he breathed out, on that sigh, he murmured,

“Stay.”

Castiel pulled away, to look at him properly.

Dean lifted his head, and met Castiel’s eyes. He looked shy, and ashamed, but he said,

“Stay, Cas.”

And then he said,

“Please.”

And in his heart, Castiel had already known. Maybe he’d known deep down from the first time he’d met Dean, in the same way that he’d known he was going to take the revenant’s pain, in the same way that he’d known he was going to make the logging company turn tail and run, in the same way that he’d known back in New York that he was going to leak evidence in defence of a man he was supposed to be prosecuting. Because it was inevitable. Because it was who he was. Because if people were trees, decisions like this were his roots.

“I’m staying,” Castiel said. “I’m staying with you.”

He put a hand on Dean’s cheek. Dean’s skin was soft under his touch. Castiel dragged his thumb a little, just to feel it. And this time, when Dean leaned in, it was slow. It was careful. The touch of his lips to Castiel’s, when it came, was so gentle that it almost split Castiel’s heart in two.

And then one of his strong arms was around Castiel’s waist, pulling him in closer. And Castiel was being kissed, kissed deeply, kissed like he knew a kiss between him and Dean would always be – _had_ to be, because it was them. This was how they felt about each other become movement, become simple touch. Everything that had been filling Castiel’s chest, all the happiness, all the pain, all the hope and wanting over the days they’d spent together, it was here in this kiss. It was in the way Castiel pushed close. It was in the way Dean cupped the back of his neck. It was in the way Castiel pushed his hand through Dean’s hair, let the tops of his fingertips find the softness of antlers.

This was who he was. This was who Dean was.

When they broke apart, it was without bashfulness. No more shyness on Dean’s face. What they wanted, what they both wanted, was too clear for embarrassment.

Together, they went into the house – they went home.

As they crossed the porch, they passed the fallen bough of white wood.

At its very tip, there was a tiny shoot of green.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Hope you enjoyed it <3


End file.
